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Quick Fire Series: The Customer Does Not Experience Your Org Chart · What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It

• 0:00
  Simon: Louis, every function can do its job perfectly and the customer can still have a terrible experience.
• 0:06
  Simon: Today we're asking why and what that says about the way we organize ourselves.
• 0:11
  Simon: What's the TL;DL("Too Long; Didn't Listen") for anyone who doesn't have time for the whole episode?
• 0:16
  Louis: As you've rightly said, companies organize vertically into functions, but customers experience them horizontally as one journey.
• 0:24
  Louis: Every team can hit its local target while context, promises, and accountability disappear at the joins.
• 0:32
  Louis: While specialization is necessary, making the customer integrate the specialists is the design failure.
• 0:39
  Simon: Stay with us for around 15 minutes or so to learn more.
• 0:44
  Simon: Hello and welcome to episode 63 of the What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It podcast.
• 0:49
  Simon: I'm Simon Daniels…
• 0:50
  Louis: and I'm Louis Fernandes.
• 0:52
  Simon: Are exploring the challenges facing SaaS GTM leaders that Louis has been discussing in his newsletter, drilling into the topics a little further to provide some solid practical guidance for SaaS GTM success.
• 1:03
  Simon: We've already covered revenue as a system, ICP versus segmentation, and route to market and brand.
• 1:09
  Simon: Now, in this penultimate episode of our five-part What B2B Forgot run, we turn inward to ask how the organization itself can quietly break the customer experience.
• 1:21
  Simon: Let's get to it, shall we?
• 1:22
  Louis: Let's do it
• 1:25
  Simon: Let's start with, Louis, what you call the geometry problem.
• 1:30
  Simon: What do you mean by that?
• 1:32
  Louis: So this is building on a sort of idea that we, we started last week where we said that, uh, a lot of organizations build around the functions, and the way that customers experience it though is at a brand level.
• 1:47
  Louis: And the challenge that we have is that the geometry of what we have within our organization doesn't match the way that people buy.
• 1:55
  Louis: So, you know, there's the whole problem of marketing does marketing and then stops there.
• 2:02
  Louis: Sales owns acquisition and stops there.
• 2:04
  Louis: Services owns implementation and stops there.
• 2:07
  Louis: Customer success, uh, owns adoption and stops there.
• 2:10
  Louis: Account management owns expansion and stops there.
• 2:13
  Louis: That's not how customers go through the organizations.
• 2:16
  Louis: They experience all these different things simultaneously and at different phases of the, the journey.
• 2:22
  Louis: And the whole point is, the customer is ultimately trying to solve a problem.
• 2:26
  Louis: They don't really care whether it's your software that does something, whether you actually have managed to harness pixies in the background and you have them hammering away and fixing the problem, or whether actually you've outsourced the whole thing, uh, somewhere else.
• 2:47
  Louis: They care about the entire outcome, and does it deliver value?
• 2:51
  Simon: No pixies were harmed or have been harmed in the making of SaaS software.
• 2:56
  Simon: You use an airlines example.
• 2:59
  Simon: Take us through that and the point you were trying to make with that that illustration, if you like.
• 3:05
  Louis: So yeah, let's say, um, you're, you're catching a flight, and your flight gets canceled.
• 3:10
  Louis: Okay?
• 3:11
  Louis: So you're already at the airport.
• 3:13
  Louis: Your bags have been checked in.
• 3:15
  Louis: You're sitting there waiting at the gate, and they've canceled the flight.
• 3:19
  Louis: Now what?
• 3:20
  Louis: Well, do, do you have to say,"Well, actually I've now got to deal with the people at the gate to say I'm, I'm actually here, and I, I need the information about what's gonna be happening next." And they say,"Well, hang on a minute.
• 3:31
  Louis: Sorry, you're gonna have to talk to the main airline.
• 3:33
  Louis: I just happen to work for the airport, and I've just been here to, you know, make sure that people are actually boarding the flight as they need to." you say,"Well, h- but hang on, I also need to get my bags back.""Oh, y- sorry, you're gonna have to talk to the baggage handling people about that." but I also need to organize a hotel for...""Ah, no, that's customer service back at head office." but what about transportation to and from that h-""No, go and talk to the taxi company," blah, blah, blah.
• 3:59
  Louis: Every single part, one of those components acts individually, the idea of the fact that you would have to organize it all yourself by interacting with each one separately is nuts.
• 4:14
  Louis: So what you wanna do is you wanna have a, a single point of contact, and we always used to refer to these as SPOCs internally, single points of contact.
• 4:21
  Louis: Then organize everything across the entire business for you and, and, and get it all done.
• 4:26
  Louis: We're not necessarily saying it needs to be one person, but what we are saying is that every different function needs to be cognizant of what is going on and be able to deal with it so that as a customer, you feel like you're having that seamless experience.
• 4:41
  Simon: Right.
• 4:42
  Simon: And it, it's exactly that seamless experience, isn't it?
• 4:45
  Simon: It, it's from the customer's perspective, you, you shouldn't need to have to be thinking about all these different mechanisms.
• 4:51
  Simon: And you talk about task completion as opposed to, um, outcome ownership, I suppose.
• 4:58
  Simon: That's, that's the, the key point here, isn't it?
• 5:00
  Simon: And what that actually feels like for the customer.
• 5:02
  Louis: It is, but it's also, I think, a bit more than that.
• 5:05
  Louis: If you, if you don't have the information available, let's say you- you're dealing with one department and then you move to another department.
• 5:11
  Louis: If that context is lost in translation, yeah, as a customer, you're having to go back and start and explain it all over again.
• 5:17
  Louis: I mean, great example from B2C perspective is if anybody's ever had any dealings with Sky or with Virgin Media or anyb- of those kind of guys, every time you're on a queue, you'd wait for three-quarters of an hour, speak to somebody, and they say,"Oh, sorry, I can't help you.
• 5:32
  Louis: It's another department." And then they hand you off and you've gotta start all over again.
• 5:36
  Louis: Two hours later, you still haven't solved the problem.
• 5:38
  Louis: You're really frustrated now, and you're going,"Well, I'm gonna migrate the minute I've got an opportunity to someone else, because you're all rubbish." That's what we're talking about.
• 5:49
  Louis: And actually, when we think about the, the fact that in recurring revenue businesses, it's the recurring revenue, stupid.
• 5:57
  Louis: That's the bit where we- we're reliant on winning the business on day one, on day two, on day three, on day four, and having that recurring impact.
• 6:08
  Louis: If we destroy that recurring impact by having a really shitty customer experience, we're never gonna make the money back.
• 6:15
  Louis: And given that right now, when we talk about the cost of acquisition versus the lifetime value that we're actually seeing for that, we see that the LTV/CAC ratios are, are not going in the right direction.
• 6:27
  Louis: so it's even more important to retain customers and retain them for a long time, and the way we do that is by making their lives easy, not by making it harder.
• 6:36
  Simon: And so the obvious way to do that, which has been the way of SaaS, is to have a customer success team or function, right?
• 6:44
  Simon: And, and they own this relationship and, and they own the, the ultimate, as it says on the tin, the, the success of the customer.
• 6:52
  Simon: That, that's gonna fix the problem, no?
• 6:54
  Louis: That's a brilliant, uh, thing, isn't it?
• 6:55
  Louis: It's a bit like having a chief innovation officer in a, in an organization.
• 6:59
  Louis: The thing I've always had a mantra about is never join an organization that has a chief innovation officer,'cause if there's only one person responsible for innovation, you're screwed before you start, right?
• 7:08
  Louis: And it's no different for customer success.
• 7:09
  Louis: Everybody's accountable for c- the customer success.
• 7:12
  Louis: That's how we all get paid.
• 7:14
  Louis: We get a salary every month.
• 7:15
  Louis: If it's just down to one department, and I can abdicate all responsibility and wash my hands of it, what a horrible experience that's gonna be for it.
• 7:23
  Louis: It's like,"Oh, it's all their fault.
• 7:24
  Louis: It's their problem, their problem, their problem." And we all point towards CS.
• 7:28
  Louis: Not only that, but the, the, the amount of pressure that then puts on the CS department to be all things to all people, it's just not possible.
• 7:37
  Louis: So it doesn't work like that at all, and I think thing we have to understand is that responsibility should follow customer problems and not stop at the organizational boundaries.
• 7:48
  Louis: That's a really important point.
• 7:50
  Louis: And, and again, it's not saying that everybody owns everything, that'd just be chaos.
• 7:53
  Louis: It just means that the system has to ensure that somebody continues to own the outcome as a problem crosses functional lines, which is one of the reasons, uh, I think marketing agencies are a really good example of this.
• 8:05
  Louis: We have account directors who look after the customer, and the customer doesn't care whether you're in the creative department or whether you're in strategy or in planning, or whether, you know, somebody's buying media space.
• 8:17
  Louis: Single point of contact is the account director and the account management team, and they own effectively the P&L for that customer, as well as the revenue.
• 8:25
  Simon: Yeah.
• 8:25
  Simon: Yeah.
• 8:26
  Simon: It, it's very much actually how we do things at Accenture in, insofar as, you know, we- we'll have a person who is overall responsible for a client relationship and, and the client outcome, even if they're not actually doing the work.
• 8:40
  Simon: Other, other teams and other people could be delivering individual engagements and projects and so on, but there is somebody that's got that kind of oversight, so it's a similar kind of concept.
• 8:50
  Louis: Just on that point, I mean, I think the danger we have here is that we've somehow accidentally outsourced customer success to customer success.
• 8:59
  Simon: Yeah, exactly.
• 9:00
  Simon: Yeah.
• 9:00
  Simon: Lowercase and title case.
• 9:02
  Louis: Yeah.
• 9:02
  Simon: It, it's a bit of an aside, although I like your point about the chief innovation officer.
• 9:07
  Simon: I've often thought that with, like, chief strategy officer or really anything like that.
• 9:12
  Simon: Again, it's, it's a bit like if there's one person in, in charge of strategy, like, what's the rest of the ex co or the board doing?
• 9:19
  Simon: Should they not be thinking about strategy?
• 9:22
  Simon: Similar kind of thing.
• 9:23
  Louis: Exactly.
• 9:24
  Simon: Anyway, we, uh, we won't, uh, we won't get sucked into that.
• 9:28
  Simon: The, the other thing that I liked from the, the newsletter that you wrote about was, was this idea of a- again going back to the, the handoffs across all the functions and the, and the, the risk anyway that the customer has to be explaining themselves again and again, and they become this kind of API between all the internal functions.
• 9:47
  Simon: Just expand on that a little bit.
• 9:50
  Louis: And it goes back to this idea of having to re-explain the context, because I now act as the, as the customer, I'm acting as my own glue your organization.
• 9:58
  Louis: And it's kind of interesting.
• 9:59
  Louis: I, I, I'm gonna flip it on its head a little bit, because I've seen this a lot of times from a sales capacity when I've been selling into organizations in the past, and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing in that organization that you're talking to, and you as the seller end up acting as the orchestrator, not just of your own organization, but of the customer organization as well, making sure finance gets involved, making sure procurement gets involved, making sure that we have the IT folks getting involved as well as the line of business, that, you know, you including users as well as decision-makers and so on and so forth.
• 10:33
  Louis: This is one of the things that we've always talked about when I go back to thinking about how you run opportunities as multi-threading.
• 10:39
  Louis: So the question is, why would it not be any different the other way around?
• 10:44
  Louis: And what we end up seeing is we end up seeing the customer now having to take ownership of orchestration of their own within the client, and acting as that glue and, and, you know, getting Peter to talk to Paul to, to talk to, you know, Sandra or whatever, because people are not doing it inherently.
• 11:05
  Louis: At what a huge amount of time, effort, and energy the customer is then spending to orchestrate their own…
• 11:14
  Simon: Yeah.
• 11:15
  Louis: …reality.
• 11:16
  Simon: And, and they're left thinking,"Wait a minute.
• 11:18
  Simon: I'm, I'm paying for this.
• 11:19
  Simon: What am I actually getting for my, for my money?" So what, what's the, what's the test then of, of whether handovers are really working in, in that situation to avoid customers feeling like they're having to run the show?
• 11:33
  Louis: Yeah, I think it, it's just basically It goes back to something that I've talked about a lot in the past, is communication, communication, communication.
• 11:40
  Louis: Just making sure everybody's on the same page.
• 11:42
  Louis: What you don't want to end up with is you end up with local task completion, and everybody gets a tick in the box.
• 11:47
  Louis: But overall, the total outcome was a failure.
• 11:51
  Louis: what you end up saying is you're saying,"Well, everybody's done their job.
• 11:53
  Louis: I, I d- did my job perfectly.
• 11:55
  Louis: I, I did Went from A to B and from B to C.
• 11:58
  Louis: That was my bit done." And the next department turns around and,"Well, I did C to D." And the next per- goes,"I did D to E." And everybody's ticked their box.
• 12:06
  Louis: What they haven't realized is that actually the customer doesn't care about A to B and B to C and B- C to D, they care about A to Z, where Z is the outcome.
• 12:16
  Louis: And actually, I don't really wanna have to think about the, the inner ma- workings and machinations of it all.
• 12:20
  Louis: So I think what we, we, we need to think about is, uh, the rule of handoffs.
• 12:26
  Louis: A successful handoff transfers meaning, context, and accountability, and that's the important thing.
• 12:33
  Louis: not about changing a CRM stage.
• 12:35
  Louis: It's not about making sure that you, you've involved somebody from the right department or whatever and then gone,"Well, that's it.
• 12:42
  Louis: I don't need to know anymore." It's about ensuring they have the full understanding and the full picture of what's going on, and you're bringing them into the conversation at a point whereby the transition just feels seamless.
• 12:56
  Simon: And by the way, that outcome is, is the delivery of value and not just the signing of the deal, which is what we're gonna get onto next time.
• 13:03
  Louis: Absolutely, and that's an a, a crucial point, but let, let's deal with that in the next pod.
• 13:07
  Simon: Exactly.
• 13:07
  Simon: We'll leave it there for now.
• 13:10
  Simon: Louis, tie all that up for us.
• 13:12
  Louis: Yeah.
• 13:13
  Louis: So I think the, one of the, the big challenges with all of this is, is we said is it's about making sure it's a seamless experience for the customer.
• 13:20
  Louis: And I think the problem is that this is where governance sometimes fails to act, because governance lives in those gaps.
• 13:30
  Louis: It's not simply about the process compliance or holding more meetings, it's about how you make the organization operate in a non-fragmented way.
• 13:42
  Louis: So commercial outcomes are not the end goal.
• 13:47
  Louis: Somebody has to govern what happens between the functions, and somebody has to ensure that the data is consistent.
• 13:53
  Louis: Somebody has to ensure that we've got clear escalation points.
• 13:56
  Louis: Somebody has to also think about, how do we ensure that the customer is still handheld through the whole thing they have a fantastic experience that leads onto advocacy, it leads onto renewal, it leads onto more revenue coming in over time, and it leads onto the thing that we've talked about in the past, annually recurring impact.
• 14:27
  Simon: And those are our takeaways for this episode.
• 14:29
  Simon: Thank you so much for listening to episode 63 of the What's Broken in GTM and How to Fix It podcast.
• 14:34
  Simon: Check out our LinkedIn page where you can find show notes relating to the episode.
• 14:38
  Simon: You can also get in touch with us via LinkedIn and follow us for regular updates.
• 14:42
  Simon: And don't forget to subscribe in your preferred podcast app to make sure you don't miss an episode.
• 14:47
  Simon: Next time, in our final episode of this series, we ask what really happens after the contract is signed, and why close won is where value creation begins, so please join us.
• 14:58
  Simon: Until then, it's goodbye from me, Simon Daniels…
• 15:00
  Louis: and it's goodbye from me, Louis Fernandes.
• 15:02
  Louis: Have a fantastic day!