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EP031: The Segmentation Grid Behind Every CS Strategy · The Chief Customer Officer Podcast

• Jeff Breunsbach: All right, welcome back to another episode of Chief Customer Officer. It is Thursday, September third. How are we already in September, Jay? Jay Nathan: I don't know. I guess we live through the first eight months of the year already. But it seems to have gone by faster and faster. That's the theory of relativity, right? The older you are, the shorter a year is, comparatively. So here we are. September. Happy fall. Jeff Breunsbach: actually just read I just read another article or a a quick I think it was a Twitter thread by a neurosurgeon and I forget how the the concept of what it was called but he also explained that human nature of of building routines actually makes your memories collapse because essentially nothing is memorable if you have a routine because it's very similar. Jay Nathan: Mm. Jeff Breunsbach: my day is the same. I wake up I take my kids to school I go to work I Leave where you know, like all of these things. And so he was also explaining the idea that also it's really hard for us when we like want to establ like people like routines, but then it's also hard for us to remember the year because you're like, I don't remember what happened on that day because it was the same as the other days. so I I I thought that is like interesting what you said too, of like this idea of like, yeah, the the year kind of feels like it just went by, like what happened, you know? Jay Nathan: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. so interesting that you uncovered that. I I actually was listening to a podcast. There's this guy named Craig Rochelle that I listened to. and haven't listened to him for a long time because I've been just like filling my head with AI content. And I realized like, hey, there's there's more to the world right now than just AI. Like, I actually need to keep leadership content coming into my ears. Right. And so I got back into my Craig Rochelle podcast and he was talking about This idea that great leadership is really a function of your consistency, doing one thing, at least one thing, just really well and consistently that makes everything else you do better. So his example is pretty funny. It's just like a personal example. He's like, I floss every morning. I floss. And by flossing, you know, it makes me feel like I'm a person who flosses and takes care of myself. And so I eat better during the day and I work out. And then I get to work on time. And then I And it's just like this one, I think they call it Apex Habit, is what he pulled that. I Jeff Breunsbach: Mm. Yeah. Jay Nathan: forget who the author is that he pulled that from, but like what's the one thing that you could do personally or in your company, especially if you're leading a team or if you're the CEO of a business, that is like the thing you could do that just makes everything better. Like what if what if I had everybody on my team reach out to three prospects per week just to check in with them, tell them we're thinking about Ask them if there's anything we can do to help. Like, what if everybody did that? That would make the entire business better. We would probably sell more. We'd be more empathetic to what's going on in the market. Like, just that one habit. So his point was consistency and, you know, sort of faith in what you're doing over a long period of time is the way to be successful. Right. And I, you know, I've I've seen that. in in in in both positive and negative ways in my life is just just the the consistency of doing anything. If it's a positive thing, it's going to make everything better. If it's a negative thing, it's gonna make everything worse. So anyway. Good good side side quest this morning. Jeff Breunsbach: I like it. This is a good Yeah, good side tension. okay, where I wanted to start, I was we were we were talking before this and I said, wait, I'm gonna I'm gonna wait to tell you this until I press record. I feel like I I I feel like I've cheated as of yesterday and I I feel fantastic about it. I feel like I am I Jay Nathan: Okay. Jeff Breunsbach: I I feel like I, you know, s my my eyes have have come off, you know, my Yeah, I'm just Jay Nathan: The scales have come off your eyes. Okay. Jeff Breunsbach: I Jay Nathan: Like Paul on the road to Jeff Breunsbach: Finally used Jay Nathan: Damascus. Jeff Breunsbach: I like finally went back to ChatGPT and used Codex for the first time. And I've got to I've gotta tell you, I feel like I've been I I feel like I've been too married to Claude for the past like seven months. And it Jay Nathan: Claude. Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: was like a breath of fresh air. And I was like, my gosh, it actually is like doing what I want. It's speaking in a a way that is like way more direct and what less like roundabout, even though I've tried to coach Claude to give me ASTD 100 and whatever, like, you know, but it it it so it just reminded me of like, well, you I don't think you can ever get married to one LLM and like one model, and that it's you've got to be and and I guess the reason why I think this is interesting too is like the the the frustration I had yesterday was like, well, not not all of my tools are connected to Cloud or to Codex and to Chat GPT. And I was trying to go through that exercise and I'm like, God, this is terrible. And so it Jay Nathan: Ha ha ha ha. Jeff Breunsbach: And so it just, I guess, like flashed in my mind of like, okay, I've got to be able to port all this stuff to new environments, right? Like I've how do I how do I go create a system that can like, you know, be very easy to connect into and like pull who I am and my writing style and all this kind of stuff that I want it to like know about me. it just kind of like went back and reminded me of like, yeah, like I think it's Gary Tan who runs why combinator who Jay Nathan: Why combinator? Jeff Breunsbach: created like the g brain and g stack which are like and so to me it reminded me of that concept again where he's like kind of always feeding this stuff back into a GitHub repository that he can then you know kind of use at his discretion. and it like that that's becoming a bit of I guess a very powerful concept. but yeah you if you need a little refresh go, I think it was on Luna. I think it was maybe Luna or no it was Terra, maybe I think it's like not the high not the newest frontier. It's like the one below and I was like amazed. I was literally Jay Nathan: Wow. Jeff Breunsbach: like I can I'll I'll have to show you after this like a before and after of like what Claude built and then I just had Chat GPT go basically go redo it and it was like night and day. I like, wow, like this is this is kind of a shocker. Jay Nathan: The the challenge that we all have is that we we have been given a harness by the model provider. The harness is clawed, right? The model is Opus or Fable. The harness is ChatGPT and Codex. The model is Luna or Terra or whatever the hell they're shipping these days. Life is going to get better for all of us when you when we choose a harness that has durable connectivity to all the apps that we use, right? This is a problem because they've got you locked in now because you've got skills Jeff Breunsbach: Yes. Jay Nathan: deployed to their harness. You've got connectors built deployed to their harness. But what if you had a harness that had everything connected into it and the model was being chosen on the back end dynamically or by you based on your use case? That that is so what the model providers are doing and they're going to have to do, it's very interesting to watch. They're they're coming up the stack. They're moving up the stack toward applications, right? And at the same time, Nvidia is doing the same thing now, right? Because they're investing in open source, they're buying hugging face. And other companies they're th they're gonna end up having their own harnesses at some point. Everybody's going to go up the stack and there's going to be a number of different harness providers that will let you route to any model. But it's not in Claude's best interest to let you route to open AI, right? They're trying to sell their tokens, not open AI's tokens, and vice versa. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: So yeah, very interesting times. But I think what you're seeing is like it's the the exact problem of lock in that we've got to think about for all of our our companies and ourselves personally. Jeff Breunsbach: Well, and this this also gets to the to your point, I think a little bit or maybe to earlier points we've made on this this podcast as well, which is at work, you know, trying to play this game is harder, right? Because in order for me to get a harness that I can in order for me to get to a harness that I can connect to all of my tools, I need that to probably be run through my security team, my IT team. Like, okay, can I connect all these tools? Do we have an agreement? again, we're a Right now we're a healthcare company, so I need to make sure that we've got basically you know compliance, even though I'm not using or touching PHI or PII, like I still need to make sure that that exists because of the case that it does. And like, you know, we've got provisions that we gotta think about. So that's where I think it also like it's it's I guess like you feeling you there is this like true feeling of like wow, innovation's so fast, I can go. So when I'm working on like personal projects, like you know, this podcast, Chief Customer Officer. I'm just going yeah, I'm gonna go pick a new harness and test it and and there's like this real, I don't know, I feel like on the edge or closer to the edge. And then when I'm at you know, work, it's it's harder, it's a little okay, we've got to be a little Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: more methodical. We have to think enterprise, we have to think about security, we've got to think about data privacy and all these things, right? So it is, I don't know, it's like this juxtaposition in my life right now, which is interesting. because I get like so excited on one side and then I'm not, you know, still excited about my my what's happening at junction. We're doing a lot of cool things. But I think I guess in terms of how fast enterprises can move around AI and some of these things. Like I guess you realize the challenges of of like again, the going through the methodical approach to like, okay, can this pass our security checks? Does the do we need do we need a like a true contract? You know, do we need to make sure that we're not that our data is not being used to train models and whatnot. Like that, that becomes a real aspect of it. Jay Nathan: Yeah. I I couldn't agree more. It but I mean, I still run across companies and probably some people that listen to this podcast that are like, Yeah, we we don't even have access to Chat GPT across the board or Claude. They don't even have it and I think it's all solvable. It's just a matter of priorities, right? In and and how much emphasis, quite frankly, the CEO is putting behind it. Because You c you can move quickly on this stuff at this point. There's no no excuse for that. Depends on on A whether you think a you know, true AI capability is a differentiator for your company. If not, I'd argue you're you're probably missing something. If you don't think that AI can be a differentiator in some way, shape, or form for your business, either operationally or from a go-to-market perspective, you're probably missing something. And you better watch your watch your heels. anyway, Yeah, it's an interesting juxta juxtaposition for sure to deal with. Jeff Breunsbach: well, one other thing that I was sharing with you before the podcast too, and I think a little bit would be curious for our audience is I think every so often, like you just alluded to, you know, w we're living in this world of everything's AI. We should automate as much as we can. You know, we should try and and just kind of like almost like get to a point where maybe jobs even are are out of, you know, we can replace jobs with AI and automation and whatnot. And so that you know, you kind of always have that in the front of your mind. And then the unit I always there's those moments where you just kind of get brought back and you're like, wait a minute, like in the real world, like you said, I forget the chart, but there's like the chart of like a hundred dots, and then it's like, Okay, two Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: dots are actually like people who are living on the frontier, and then like ten dots are people who've used AI, and you're like, there's still like eighty seven dots that have never touched AI, and you're like, Okay, that's Jay Nathan: Yeah, yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: So, anyways, that's like so one of those moments for me though is is just getting back into like more and more customer conversations, right? as much as we want to automate, as much as we want to do anything, like it still is like humans on either side trying to each make decisions for their businesses, do the right things, build process together. and there's like still that relationship aspect. And so I I keep, I guess, like finding myself in these moments being like, okay. A skill set that is still necessary that people should still lean into is I guess the the non-technical side of like, okay, have we built relationships with these people? How can I build trust quickly through a phone call, through a a video call with my customers? How do I drive transparency? How do I think about communication? How do we think about relationships? Like these things Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: to me are still so necessary in our world. And I just Like sometimes I I think I get caught in this idea of okay, let's just automate as much as possible and then like we'll just kind of like deal with the customer at the end of the day. And it's like, yeah, you can't really even do that, right? Like you've actually like you've got to be building this relationship with the customer at all times. and then another point that I recently did was I created a channel. I think I told you about this, where I just brought in customer quotes from Fathom. And it was, you know, sectioned out. It's it's run by Claude or something in the background. I forget what how I set it up. And it just like drops in quotes. And one thing, one change that I've made recently is instead of just dropping in the quotes, I actually link to the call. So you can press the play button. And it's actually super interesting how that little difference, that nuance of changing it from like text to a video, has like changed the perception in that channel because it feels like now people are actually. li watching those and listening and now the customer voice is being much more spread across the business versus just like these little quotes that people can kind of throw away almost or like, sure, the customer said that. But like, hey, no, no, no, I want you to go watch this time when our, you know, we when we went and said this to a customer or a customer said this to us. And like that's that's not like a quote we made up or something we're just pulling out of text. Like that's a person saying this and you can watch them. You can see how they're reacting. You can see the frustration. You can see the excitement, whatever it might be, you know. so anyways, I d I just got reminded of that again. Jay Nathan: That's so good. That's so good, Jeff. Like the the words don't really do it justice, right? You can read the words on the page, but until you see the exasperation with which they said the words, then, you know, you don't really fully feel the moment the way that y you did or the person who was on the phone with that customer did. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: So I think that's a that's a that's a powerful move right there. I like it. Jeff Breunsbach: It it reminds you of ride alongs, right? so one of the things I'm I'm gonna go suggest to our leadership team right now is to do some ride-alongs. And I'm I'm actually assigning execs some executive sponsors to accounts because because I I I you know, again, just think that we need to be closer to the customer, understanding their challenges and opportunities and like hearing it directly from them. and I think like we need the executive team that at junction to be hearing and seeing that more frequently than we are right now. and again, like I can as you know, I think from a customer success leadership standpoint, I can be pushing quotes and videos and everything as much as possible. Right. But again, I think I think living it and being in a call, being in a call where you know your stomach right beforehand is like churning because you're like, I just I gotta get on a call with this customer. They're upset. I know that they're gonna be frustrated. You know, I've got to admit some stuff from our side. I've got to whatever like just the even those things I think are the things that like I I you know, you need people to feel around the business. Cause I think that drives not only clarity about what we're building, how we're building it, but it I think it starts to eliminate too just like the speed and urgency with which like the longer that this be you know, the longer that this drags on, it isn't the person who's maybe building something or doing something behind the scenes that feels it. It's the customer and the person who's the closest to the customer on the front end who's feeling that Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: like who's feeling that urge, that sense of urgency, that person who's reaching up and following up every single day about, Hey, where is this? What's what's going on with this? So anyway, it's just Jay Nathan: Yeah. Especially in the in the age of AI too. Like I was talking to an engineering leader yesterday and we were talking about the product. He's he's actually a product leader, not a well, he's both, like a CTO. And we were talking about the product he was working on, and I was like, I the words were about to come out of my mouth like your inj we gotta get your engineers in front of the customer. And he said it before I did. He's like, we're getting the engineers in front of the customers. I was like, dude, that is absolutely the right call right now. This stuff is moving so fast. And to hear what what what the customers are thinking and doing and saying, you cannot take that second hand right now from any any part of the of the business. so remember the fifty and fifty we did when we were at Higher Logic? Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, I was actually just thinking about that. Yeah. Jay Nathan: That just came to mind. Yeah. So 50 and 50 for those who who we never if you didn't hear us talking about that, we did 50 calls, 50, 50 customer visits and calls in 50 days. And every single executive on the executive team was part of those calls and had a structured format for the kind of questions that we wanted to get answers from from the client and the engagement model for that. meeting that we had with them, the CSM or the account manager would facilitate the call, but they'd have to have one of the one of the five execs or six execs. By the way, like one of my favorite executives to get onto a call like that is the CFO because CFOs cut through all the BS. They know where value is. They're way more intuitive on this stuff than most people would ever think. So Trisha was our CFO at at higher level still is. She was so good on those calls. Our CTO was also really good, if you remember. but you know, we used to do back when I was at People Matter, we used to do listening tours where we'd literally go, because we had a lot smaller customers back then. It was like a more of a SMB mid-market kind of play, although we did big ones too. But we would go to a big market, LA, Austin, New York, where we'd have dozens of customers, and we'd go see as many as we could in a day. And literally see them in their environment, which were restaurants, retail Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: and hospitality. and it would be the CSM and an executive, same same thing. But you're right, like you have to you have to feel it for yourself to build the empathy for the customer to sort of, you know, think about how we drive operations internally, whether it's the way we bill or the way we build the product, to make it better for the customer and and to really want to do that. So that's cool. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Look at us talking about empathy, you know? Jay Nathan: I know, look at us. okay, speaking of which, like getting back on the front lines with a customer, I facilitated a workshop yesterday and I want to get your feedback on on what we did here. So essentially So what what we did, and I'll show you this on the screen. I know everybody won't be able to see this, but I'll describe it. it was it was actually just a segmentation workshop. So, you know, we we help customers build digital experience, product analytics, you know, email campaigns. Like we we help sort of build the whole the whole the whole engagement model, especially around scaled programs. we're often working with product teams, but But often we get the opportunity to work with customer success teams as well. And what we found with with one client was we needed to sort of back up and do a segmentation exercise to make sure because we were getting lost. We were getting lost in the weeds of what are we going to do? What are we going to automate? What kind of, you know, what kind of automation in app playbooks are we going to run? What kind of emails are we going to run? It's like, well, hold on. We got to, we got to stop and step back and figure out like, what is the What's the grid look like? So we put together a very simple customer segmentation workshop. And it was really centered around four, four main elements. Number one is product attachment. So a lot of companies have grown through acquisition over the past decade, right? They have multiple product lines. They may maybe similar customer bases right within those product lines, but they're they're different because they're on a different product. We had a lot of this at our last. Company, right, Jeff. so which products are they on? What what life cycle stage are they in? And I use that terminology very deliberately: life cycle stage versus customer journey stage, because I think customer journey is something else we'll talk about some other time. But life cycle stage is like the service blueprint, onboarding, adoption, optimization, renewal, and expansion, so on and so forth. So life cycle stage, and by the way, there's there's two. Moments in that journey that are probably more important than any of the others. One is onboarding and the other one is renewal, right? If you if you have a renewal phase. The third bucket is the engagement model. And this is really like what kind of how do we segment the customers and determine who's going to get a named contact versus not? Right. So two values here, either managed or scaled, right? There's some tier above which. And maybe it's based on ARR. That's fine. I don't love it, but maybe, maybe that it's fine. Maybe it's based on employee count or annual revenue or spend in a certain category. There's some level at which an account is managed, meaning they have a named contact within your organization. And there's some level below that where they don't, right? They're part of a pooled model for one of many model for taking care of customers. So that's the engagement model. And then there's health status. Red, yellow, green. Right. And by the way, there's probably four or five different things executive sponsor relationship, product usage and behavior, sentiment and from from the feedback perspective, billing, are they paying on time? There's a handful of things, and each one of those gets a red, yellow, green rating. Right. It's not complex. It's very easy to tell. And if one of those turns red or yellow, then the entire account is red or yellow and you know exactly what to go do about it. Right. So this is where we started from a segmentation standpoint. And then we ended up with a grid that looks like this. And so for those listening, not watching, well, nobody watches because we don't have a video of this yet. Something we shall have to remedy, isn't it? email me if you know the the movie that quote came from. life cycle stage, engagement model, and health status. Right. Those three elements. So for example, I might have a life cycle stage of onboarding, the engagement model of managed, which means they have a named account lead, and a health status of red. That's a segment. What are we going to do when that happens? If if an account goes red during onboarding, it's a higher touch account because it's managed. What are we going to do? We're going to bring the sales rep back in. We're going to confirm the buyer who signed the deal is still there and you know, still actively championing this work. they're probably not gonna get an in-app kind of communication because they're not live on the product yet. They're gonna get some kind of email communication. It's probably gonna try to set up a meeting with them, but that's the play. And so what I'm trying to get the leaders to do is just tell us in business terms what you want to happen with each segment. Don't worry about what systems, right? That comes next. Lay out the business requirements for each of those segments. So anyway, this was the whole thing. The next thing we're going to do, they're they're going to do their homework now. They're going to lay out the business requirements in this document. And then we're going to come back and say, okay, like here's how now we're going to start thinking about prioritizing those segments. And then what tools are we going to use, whether it be Pendo and App or they have Planhat, right? Or some other email system to go send automated lifecycle campaigns to support these segments. What are going to do? Trying to put everything in a bucket and then figure out what we're going to do with each bucket. So there you go. Jeff Breunsbach: first of all, is that a brave heart quote? Jay Nathan: Yeah, it was, but you just gave it away. Jeff Breunsbach: Well, somebody can well yeah, I guess. second of Jay Nathan: Ha ha ha. Jeff Breunsbach: all, you have a great knack of simplifying things. And I have been thinking about what you showed on slide one, because of the project I'm working on right now, Project Mycroft is what I'm calling it. and the Jay Nathan: Mycroft. Jeff Breunsbach: reason why I think the the reason why I love this is just the simplicity behind it. like you said, I think I think we think more I I think we tend to make things harder, especially in customer success. We want to invent almost like we want to we want to continue to reinforce and invent why we exist, what we should be doing Jay Nathan: my God. Jeff Breunsbach: with customers. We want to make it feel like okay, there's all this laborious things that go into it. And in essence, like you said, I think at the end of the day, Are they using the thing or have they onboarded and like are they actually set up to use the thing? Are they using the thing and are they going to renew with us? Is like the whole concept of a software business. And like you said, I think getting us context about those life cycle stages, I think is like what I'm taking out of this right here of like feed the context of like these lifecycle stages. And then that context essentially helps tell us are we on track, off track? And that's like again, if we're on track, keep everything going. If we're off track, we know what to go fix and we should go fix it. And like you said, again, I think like speaking in simplicity and seeing things visually laid out like this to me, is like super impactful. Cause the other thing that I get out of this too is think about how easy this would be to communicate across the business, right? I think the thing that I'm I'm going through right now or learning, right, is is junction. I mean, we're going through massive growth. And the game of telephone becomes harder with every person you add into the business. Jay Nathan: Yep. Jeff Breunsbach: And so I also think about how like what you've outlined again is simple to communicate. And if it's simple to communicate, then that is what spreads and that that's what sticks, right? Like the more complex, the harder the more that you need somebody to go refer back to a document to go back and look at a playbook. you know, over and over and over again is actually like the wrong behavior because you want speed in a business. You want them to be operating with a lot of you want I think about it a lot as like bumpers in a bowling lane versus like I don't want playbooks that are so stringent that like you have to do every single step in exact motion every single time because I just don't think that that's how we're Jay Nathan: Yes. Jeff Breunsbach: that's like we don't operate like that. Like systems we might be able to train Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: and operate like that, but humans don't. And so humans need to they they need the the playing field, they need the bumpers on a bowling lane. And we all need to be doing the same things in a general direction. And that's like the sense that so anyways, I'm I'm drifting from this, but I like slide one a lot. Jay Nathan: No, no. What you just said what you just said is really cool because I listened to a podcast yesterday, the top line podcast, and that's the what's his name? Sam Jacobs, that that crew. Jeff Breunsbach: yeah. Yep. Jay Nathan: there's a guy named Keenan, what's his name? founder and CEO of A Sales Growth Company. author of Gap Selling. he was on their show Sunday, which I listened to yesterday. And he was saying the same thing about, I mean, more of a sales playbook kind of thing, but the same thing, right? You you don't you don't want to force everybody into the same exact approach to to having a discovery call or having a a QBR with the customer. The question is what's what's the outcome? The example they use, and this will probably resonate with you, is you know, you look at people out there who play golf, there's a there's a bunch of different kinds of swings, right? There's probably the right way to do it, but if you take the the example they used was Lee Trevino back in the day. I'm I don't know anything about golf, but I understand what he was saying. They said Lee Trevino had a very wonky golf swing, but he got it done, right? And so you don't try to change his golf swing because what he's doing. actually got the outcome that he needed at that particular moment, whether it was a draw or a fade or right down the lane, right? So anyway, I just thought that was really interesting and what you said just sort of triggered triggered me there because you don't not everybody the playbook should not be a word for word script. That's for a contact Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: center, right? That's for people who, you know, honestly just need to come in and be able to to to to run a script and do things you know, very similarly with little to no training. That's Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: not what being a frontline account leader is, whether it's in sales, customer success, or s or technical. So anyway. Jeff Breunsbach: The the other thing that I'm thinking about too is like how I guess when I think about also building or looking at maybe accounts in in a CRM or other systems, also think about how these things could easily be like little chips or tags, right? Like, okay, so now if I'm a support person, think about how I could get a lot of context before I go respond to a support ticket because I know do they have one or many products? Are they what stage are they in? who's managing this? Who do I need to loop in if if anybody? And then like, where are they right now? And if if they're, like you said, if they're yellow, can I go check? they they're, you know, five days late on a invoice. And so, you know, that's not a big concern. Okay, I can still go, you know, I can go now have slightly more context. You know, I think there's other, you know, there's other contexts that are helpful in those type situations. But again, think about think about, I guess like to me, the thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is speed of context across the business on customers. Jay Nathan: Yes. Jeff Breunsbach: Like we have a lot of of again, we're like heavy Slack users. And almost every day questions are asked in Slack about customers. And the thing that I keep thinking about is how do I turn that into something that doesn't have to be answered or like questioned in Slack, right? How do I turn that into something that somebody could go look themselves and get the context that they need to go do something with? so so yeah, I like that's another reason I like these. flip to slide two real quick. And I think the the part to hone in on about what you said is the kind of plan of attack for business requirements. Again, I think some people might look at that and say, okay, the lifecycle stage is onboarding, it's a managed account and it's read. What's my playbook? And I like that you s basically said, like, I don't care about what the quote unquote playbook is right now. I just need to know like what would you expect to happen in the business or what would you want to happen in the business? Because again, I think when you myopically think about a playbook, you start thinking, okay, well, I need the CSM playbook and the CSM, but if it's a managed account and it's red, then I need the sales to get involved. So then sales needs to have a playbook about what happens if it's red and it's an onboarding. You know, like I think you then start to just become myopically focused on like what's in the playbook versus just saying, okay, I need to bring in the sales rep. They have a s a trusted relationship. I want to bring them back in. Great. I need to go, you know, do this and make sure that, you know. Everybody's informed. I need to figure out the plan of how we're gonna integrate them faster. Are we gonna bring them resources? Whatever, right? Like all these things Jay Nathan: Yep. Jeff Breunsbach: need happen. and like that also is a like you said, it could they can be solved either by technology or not. And I think also when you think about playbooks, you start assuming certain things. I and so I just like the I I don't know. It's like a not an unmir. What am I trying to say? It's basically like you're it's almost like you're tricking the person of like, hey. I don't want the playbook here. I just want you to to tell me what you think would happen across the business. Jay Nathan: Right. And the the reality of where we were getting stuck is the the the business owner of this area was like, Hey, like I need you to tell me what the playbook is. Like tell me what we're gonna build. Right. And we were stuck Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: because it was like, Well, we don't really have the business requirements. So what I really like about this, Jeff, is that this is a microcosm of strategy. We talk about this a lot and I But I I love the concept of of strategy, which is I I use Richard Rummel's definition from good good strategy, bad strategy, diagnose a problem, have a coherent plan of like a coherent plan for how you want to solve the problem, and then have actions that that sort of align to solving the problem. So number one is understanding what the problem is. So when you take a segment and you say, Okay, onboarding managed red. Like that is the problem to solve. If it's if it's adoption scaled green, it's not necessarily a problem, but that's the that's the situation to solve for. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: Like and the opportunity is the problem to solve. The opportunity is how do we get them to reference for us? How do we get them to leave a G2 re review? How do we get them to upgrade to the next tier of the product? That is the problem to be solved in that particular segment. And so Then the guiding policy, that's actually the words that Rummel uses, is okay, here's what we're gonna do in that situation. And then the coherent actions are, well, we've got their email address. If it's red because they haven't adopted yet, we can't communicate with them in app. So we're gonna go do something else, right? We're gonna go communicate with them through email, schedule a meeting with them. Like that's the coherent plan of action or the coherent actions that we're gonna take. So This is just a microcosm of thinking about, okay, how does how do we translate what we now know about every bucket of customers that we have into a strategy? And that when you you know, to tie it into yet another concept, when people get accused of not being strategic, it's because they're just not putting shit in buckets, right? They're just trying to work. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: They're just working, working, working, which is admirable, but it's not how you get ahead. You gotta you gotta sort of organize things and this is just the only way I know how to do it. Jeff Breunsbach: Well, this is the to your point too, I like the definition of the good strategy, bad strategy too, because again, it it you think about strategy as a word and a concept and people talk about it. And then I think when you ask them, they're like, Well, just speak like an executive or like, you know, act like you and you're there's all these other things they throw around. But I think at the end of the day, right, like what how do leaders progress in a business? It's usually that they're the best ones at identifying. problems and calling them out and then thinking of solutions, not always having these solutions, but at least thinking of solutions, probing, looking for solutions around, asking other people what they could do. Right. But identifying the problem, thinking of the solutions, and then actually going to execute it. Like again, not not hard to see why like some people get promoted, get more responsibility, right? Like their their kind of remit grows when if you're really good at identifying the problems, identifying the solutions and executing, I mean that's the part of I that's running a business. Like that's the the whole kit Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: and caboodle. Jay Nathan: All right, so I'll turn this into a PDF. I'm gonna put it on our website and let's link it in the show notes so people Jeff Breunsbach: Cool. Yeah. Jay Nathan: can actually see what we're talking about here. And I mean Jeff Breunsbach: You know what the you know what the beauty I was gonna say, you know what the beauty is too, is we just tr we just transferred our whole CCO website over to a GitHub repository. So getting up a new page is gonna be look Jay Nathan: Perfect. Jeff Breunsbach: at the split with our friends Claude and Codex. Jay Nathan: Perfect. That's great. Jeff Breunsbach: well, yeah, this is cool. I like this stuff. And again, I I think I praised you on the last episode, but you have a really good knack for I think simplifying and communicating and another good reminder. And I think this is this will be cool to see. it'd be fun to catch up on you know the customer and their homework and what happens next. because I imagine, like you said, right? Like what comes out of this is you guys start to understand the business requirements and then that probably starts to break down, okay. kind of which roles and which people get involved and then which tools and systems get involved. And then you start to think about okay, you know, where where what parts of this business requirements can we automate or use AI in? And then what parts are the human involved in? And becomes, you know, kind of a harmonious look at like a a complete playbook, I guess, around Jay Nathan: Yeah. Jeff Breunsbach: each of these rows. Jay Nathan: Yep. But i and I'll leave you with one thought. Like we've seen so, so, so many failed customer success platform deployments over the years. I can't even tell you how many we've seen. Maybe all of them in some way, shape, or form, right? And usually it's because this simple grid is not filled out first. I hate to boil it down to being that simple, but a lot of teams Think that they're going to get a strategy by buying a product. And the reality is that is not how it works. You have to Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. It's true. Jay Nathan: have a plan. You have to come up with a plan. The tool is just a way to automate and execute. Execute that plan. Not even automate it, but execute it and measure it. So anyway. Jeff Breunsbach: Well, this is cool and Jay Nathan: Excited. Jeff Breunsbach: I'm glad you shared it. And I think by next week I'll have some some updates on something I'm working on that would be fun to do some show and tell back to you. So we'll have to flip the flip the script. Jay Nathan: Yeah. May maybe maybe you could build some of these core concepts into it, you know. That is what it is, right? This is the framework behind the simple, you know, idea. I'll leave it at that. So let's do your thunder. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Yeah. well cool. All right. Jay Nathan: All right. I guess that's it. Hope everybody has a good weekend. Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. I don't know how to some sometimes I don't know how to end these, but it's as simple as like, We'll see you next time. We'll s you we'll chat chat soon. Jay Nathan: Yeah. we could do ha have you ever listened to the Smartless Podcast podcast? Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. Jay Nathan: come up with something there those guys are true entertainers so I don't know that we Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah, yeah. Jay Nathan: should try to replicate them but they always try to come up with some pun on the word by so we'll think about that all right catch you next time see ya Jeff Breunsbach: Yeah. And yeah. all right, well I'll catch you next time. All right, see ya.