Customer Success Playbook Season 2 Episode 40 - Peter Armaly - Navigating the Customer Lifecycle

Summary

In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook Podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger engage in an insightful discussion with Peter Armaly,  about the intricacies of the customer lifecycle. The conversation delves into the dangers of oversimplifying customer engagement, the importance of seamless handoffs between teams, and strategies for driving adoption and optimization throughout the customer journey.

Detailed Analysis

Understanding the Customer Lifecycle

Peter Armaly emphasizes the risks of oversimplifying the customer lifecycle, highlighting that it can lead to misunderstandings and potential churn. He stresses the importance of recognizing the natural ebbs and flows in customer satisfaction and the need for processes and people to be in place to address these fluctuations.

Onboarding and Enablement

The discussion covers the critical phases of onboarding and enablement. Armaly underscores the importance of clear communication, setting specific expectations, and personalizing the experience for each customer. He advocates for multi-format learning plans and regular check-ins to ensure progress.

Optimization and Renewals

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the often-overlooked optimization phase. Armaly promotes the use of sophisticated health scoring systems to continuously monitor customer progress towards their desired outcomes. He argues that optimization should be an ongoing process rather than a last-minute effort before renewal.

Cross-Functional Communication

The podcast highlights the necessity of regular communication between customer success, sales, and renewal teams. This collaboration ensures a comprehensive understanding of the customer's situation and helps identify upsell opportunities and potential risks early on.

AI in Customer Success

The conversation concludes with a discussion on the role of AI in customer success. Armaly sees AI as a valuable tool for automating mundane tasks, improving CRM systems, and potentially breaking down organizational silos. However, he cautions against unstructured experimentation and advocates for a centralized, strategic approach to AI implementation in customer success operations.

Business-Relevant Insights

1. Oversimplification of the customer lifecycle can lead to misaligned expectations and increased churn.
2. Personalized enablement and training plans are crucial for customer adoption and success.
3. Continuous optimization throughout the customer journey is more effective than focusing solely on renewal periods.
4. Cross-functional communication between customer success, sales, and renewal teams is vital for a holistic understanding of customer health.
5. AI has the potential to significantly improve efficiency in customer success operations, but its implementation should be strategic and centralized.

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Transcript

Roman Trebon: 0:20

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm Roman Trebon, and as always, I'm here with my co host, Kevin Metzger. We would really appreciate it if you could rate, subscribe, and share the show with your network. Kevin, we talk about customer success. We often sort of gloss over the complexity of the customer lifecycle. How do you think this impacts customer engagement, Kevin?

Kevin Metzger: 0:43

Yeah, I think it's really important to think through the entire customer lifecycle. it starts with the funnel and it comes all the way through. there's the onboarding. post go live support the transitions and all the things that happen in between. If you don't spend the time defining it and really making sure you understand all the pieces of the customer lifecycle, you can have churn much more easily. I'm excited to talk about that with Peter today.

Roman Trebon: 1:07

Yeah. you teed it up perfectly. we're excited to have Peter Armalee with us today. Peter is the principal at ValueWise, and brings years of experience in customer success strategy and execution. he's an expert in understanding the nuances of the customer life cycle. today he's going to share his thoughts on how companies can avoid oversimplifying the life cycle and focus on meaningful engagement at every stage. we're going to explore each phase of the customer life cycle that should be approached with its own objectives and metrics. Peter's going to help us and our audience understand what organizations can do during the key phases of onboarding, enablement, adoption, optimization, renewal, et cetera, to ensure success and avoid misleading views of customer engagement. With that Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Armaly: 1:52

Thanks a lot, Roman. I really appreciate the invitation to be on the show and Kevin's great to see you here too. Thanks Peter.

Roman Trebon: 1:59

let's get into it. So we're talking about how companies can oversimplify the customer life cycle. Why would that be a problem? And how would it impact long term customer engagement? Let's start there.

Peter Armaly: 2:11

Well, I think I could call it oversimplification and I think it's just a symptom of the way we do business these days. there's so much pressure in our society to get things done quickly. And I think we, as businesses, see our customers as something we can accomplish, help them accomplish success really quickly. And that's just not factual. if you've been in the business a while of helping customers, you know, There's a lot of nuance because what we're talking about is dealing with human beings. And so if you oversimplify the customer life cycle, and you just think of them as prospects becoming customers, becoming successful customers, and then becoming your advocates. That doesn't always happen. And if it does happen, it's because you put a lot of hard work into it. I think oversimplification is endemic in the business world. And it's really doing a disservice. it's probably a root cause of a lot of churn we see out there. oversimplifying things ignores the natural ebbs and flows of the customers, You can have a happy customer. Actually, more often than not, you have a thrilled customer when they're signing the contract. They're just super excited, eager to get going to accomplish their goals That level is probably impossible to attain again. you have to respect that kind of experience throughout the journey. you have to understand that those are natural things and be ready. have processes and people in place to recognize signals of when that satisfaction is ebbing and flowing and do as much as you can to make sure that those moments where it's ebbing. You have procedures to move things along and get them back up to where it flows again. ideally, you'd want frictionless handoffs between organizations as much as possible. When you talk about a life cycle, you want to make sure that life cycle is smooth and optimal. we want to live our own lives as smooth and optimally as possible. Why wouldn't you want that for your customer? Why set up artificial boundaries? That make them realize they're dealing with different people processes and organizations. That's just not smooth. And so, as a company, you have to do as much as possible to make that process smooth. Because at the end of the day, they're why you exist. Customers are why you exist. why would you want to mistreat them through kind of clunky processes? and finally, I would say. Thank you. You can't make an assumption that all the customers are the same or that they're following the same path. They're all at different levels of maturity. They all have different needs. They all have different speeds and you have to understand that and put in place the right kind of people with the right skill levels and the right kind of respect for people for customers that that can put in place the right kind of processes.

Kevin Metzger: 4:46

Peter, I think you hit on a lot of key points that are really critical to understanding how to handle a customer. a lot of times on the show, we talk about numbers. We talk about stats, but when it comes to ensuring that a customer is getting an experience that is smooth and easy. to me, the thing you talked about that is so critical is the handoffs and making sure that the flow through your process is what makes customers say, okay, yeah, we've got problems, we've got bumps, but we have had a smooth flow, or we see where the involvement is and driving that involvement through the process is, Critical to the overall experience of making your customer successful. can you talk a little bit about where you see the best places to get involved from to ensure those smooth handoffs?

Peter Armaly: 5:46

Yeah, I think so. if you break down what's happening, As customers move through their journey trying to realize value from their investment. You just have to look at who's involved on the vendor side. classically it's, it's obviously sales making sure the, the customers brought on board in terms of like signing a contract. But then, you know, the, the critical piece of the entire life cycle is actually the services piece. Because customers, as I mentioned, They're thrilled to get going, but they're not thrilled if nothing else happens after that point. And so the thrill has to happen through the engagement that the vendor, the company provides for the customer to make sure that they move towards success. And so, you know, you think about most obviously to the customer would be whoever's responsible, whatever entity is responsible for giving them the information they need to at least get moving on the platform or solution. onboarding is a critical piece and, it's easy to say, the vendor just needs to provide instructions. But those instructions are useless if they're not grounded in data that fuel the instruction. That's like a customer education team that provides information for the customer to get moving, get on the platform and get set up. I came from Oracle, so super complicated solutions. we had professional services teams doing implementation, but some solutions in other vendors are very simple and all it requires is actually a set of instructions. But I would argue that those sets of instructions still depend on information about the customer that can only come from sales. the CRM, Is vital throughout that whole life cycle. the relationship management system has to be pivotal to making sure that the customer's experience is being handled. Or addressed by data fuel processes on the vendor side. the onboarding piece can only be successful. If if that onboarding information respects the customer's environment maybe the skill level of the people, because again, you want to make it optimal. You have to understand where they're at. And what kind of channels they prefer all that kind of stuff. And then if you move through the life cycle through the adoption piece, that's. Even more pivotal around data about the customer their skill levels their expectations and the outcomes they need and and and really monitoring progress and making sure that information is arriving to them at the moment that they need it. And so to your question, Kevin, I think it's all about making sure that those handoffs. Are virtually invisible. To the customer, you want to make sure that they're shielded from the machinery that's happening on the other side. Because they don't need to know that. All they need to know is they're getting information that is respectful. And timely of where they're at in the journey. And what I mean by respectful is if they're struggling the information they're getting isn't way ahead of where they are. And so that's a tall order. I know that for vendors, that's what we all need to work towards is providing that information. that's respectful of where they're on the journey and meaningful. what you're doing by giving them that is you're moving them along at a pace that they still need to move, but respectful of where they are. I think that's a way to reduce and minimize friction and essentially increase satisfaction on the customer side.

Roman Trebon: 9:26

Yeah, Peter, I love this topic, right? And like, I think you said it, we, as a society oversimplify everything. I've seen so many, process flow charts where it's like, it's sales, it's onboarding, it's support, it's growth, We jammed this super complex, engagement into 4 words, right? you double click on the onboarding, for example, you think about how many people even on the client side are involved, right? there's the person that's signing the contract, the economic buyer, whatever you may call them. project managers, the end users, each client has different needs, different desires, different ways they may use the platform. sticking into onboarding, what are some of the key milestones or things companies can do to ensure that customers, come in, they have the super high level, they're super excited. How do you ensure that they, you know, you stay at that high trajectory and that, you know, they're enabled for long term access? Through that, through that onboarding phase.

Peter Armaly: 10:15

Yeah. So I think the number 1 skill a vendor has to have throughout the entire life cycle with a customer is really kind of stellar, excellent communications. when you're talking about onboarding, you have to make sure there's really specific expectations on both sides. usually the customer doesn't know. So the information has to come from a vendor, but what they can expect. So, you know, there's very, there's very specific steps with onboarding. And that's good because I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying It's easier to frame the subject of onboarding to get on board onto a platform There's only one way to do it. follow a certain, some number of steps in which, you know the account set up and configuration you know, defining the first use cases. the time to value that they can expect? You know, basically it was otherwise known as kind of a quick win. And, and so then there's ways to measure the progress You measure the completion rate of hitting certain milestones, there are certain steps that have to be completed. So you just make sure that these things are done and, and you just can continually communicate, whether it's like, if you're, if it's a white glove service, or a low touch digital engagement, communication is critical. the digital piece. In some sense, can be even faster because it doesn't require a human to get on a zoom call and make sure people understand what's been accomplished. There's that kind of immediate feedback that, okay, you perform the step. And now you can expect to have to do these certain things. And reminding them that at the end of this process, they'll be on board and start understanding how to use the product and And moving towards getting value from it. I'm a fan of surveys, but not a huge fan I think they're overdone. But there is an important place for the survey during the onboarding piece to get feedback about the experience the customer is having, you want them to let, you know, Whether the process included all the steps they felt were necessary. Maybe there's something missing. surveys are a good place for education for the vendor too. And I always think of surveys as 2 way streets and not just a way to kind of you know, mollify, The customer, So, I guess, onboarding, It's a set of steps that on the vendor side, there's no excuse for not understanding You're the expert. You just have to make sure the steps are followed and clearly communicate the importance of step by step and making sure they do. The customer recognizes that they've accomplished certain things, and you always want to, as much as possible, maintain that momentum of aspiration of the customer. They're thrilled to be on the platform, or at least signed a contract. You want to, keep that emotion high going through and actually the onboarding pieces where, you know, the excitement is more replaced by anxiety. Because the clock is ticking senior executives are looking at them like, okay, when are you going to get value from this? When's it going to start solving our problem? it's a really heightened sense. A period for the customer, so you have to be sensitive to that too.

Kevin Metzger: 13:21

I've had conversations with my kids about anxiety and excitement are really the same emotion. You just have to tell you frame it. But, but, but that's actually to to that point, though. And it's how you frame it. If you're active about communicating what's happening and where it's going, you get the opportunity to continue framing it as excitement versus anxiety. And, like, you said, knowing the steps and making sure they're defined. is critical to that communication process I think that's especially true. I keep thinking you said you're at Oracle. I've done most of my career. in complicated onboarding type situations, ERP type systems, Making sure everybody's got agreement on your project plans, making sure everybody's got agreement at each step. as you define your requirements, as you define, so coming right out of the sales process, and 1 of the things I've found is pushing back into the sales process and bringing onboarding. Whoever is going to do the onboarding into the sales process towards the end, making sure that you've started started getting agreements. There helps continue with that communication process and ensuring everybody's on the same page as you move in. as you go through onboarding, and you've got your communication, then you get to enable and the enablement phase. So, what strategies you recommend for driving customer adoption through the enablement phase?

Peter Armaly: 14:45

Yeah, so going back to what I said, you want to maintain that energy, excitement, Let's call it excitement through the onboarding maybe this is my roots speaking a bit. I've come from the sales side of the house where I was a solution consultant. I had to always talk about the future and possibilities and business value and Kevin, on your point about complexity. I was intentional moving into the full sales world because I wanted to understand customers in a better and more complex way. I don't think I had an appreciation for all that process and why it was necessary. So when I got exposed to onboarding and enablement, I thought a lot of it was overwrought. And that was really wrong because then once you start working on that side of the house, you realize if those steps aren't in place, that's where things go wrong. the customer gets on the wrong track, and maybe they never get back on the right track, and they eventually turn. that's why people on the services side are so. Let's call it anal about following specific steps. It's a particular type of personality that works really well in the services world. And I totally respect it because now I'm part of that world, of course, and I love it because I understand that's where success really is born. It's after the contract signed and starts and back to your question about enablement. I think it's all about. appreciating the customer differences. And so there needs to be personalization as much as possible. Training plans have to respect where the customers at a lot of them don't have the same knowledge as each other you have to make sure there's a baseline of knowledge you have to have them understand how this solution you're providing works and in a very kind of baseline kind of expectation of environment. And then, you know, these days, people learn at different different ways. And so you have to kind of consider multi format, learning plans, multi channels. There's some gamification that really works. regular check ins and reviews of progress are critical during the enablement piece. at a digital level that can be done. remotely, we all have experience with consumer applications where You try to get on board and start learning the product. the solution can make sure you're progressing in the right direction in a more complex B to B situation, you want to make sure there's product champions on the customer side that can act as your ambassadors during the enablement piece to extend your ability to train the organization. that's tough work. I don't support people who say we can, simplify all this stuff. I don't see it. Being easy in large, complex environments with big vendors with multiple product solutions and all that. It's just I don't see the day coming at least not in my lifetime where that's going to be possible.

Roman Trebon: 17:39

yeah, for sure. as we're talking through the life cycle, Peter, I, I. You know, we've talked about onboarding and enablement and, you know, the 1, the, the big part of the life cycle. I think people focus on is renewal. but I feel like the optimization sometimes gets. Overlooked they're hitting some numbers and I'm not hearing from them. So let's get them to the renewal, but let's talk about that optimization phase. how do companies make sure, once you get them through enablement onboard, you're creating value throughout, right. And you're not just talking to them when a renewal is 90 days away or you have a new sales opportunity that follows your way.

Peter Armaly: 18:14

Well, that's why I am a big fan of health scoring. not just basic health. I'm more a fan of sophisticated health scoring that's built on, statistical measurement and science. and that's kind of an easy way to sum up something that's very complicated topic. Of course. And that's, that could be a whole other podcast talking about health scores.

Roman Trebon: 18:36

a green, just a random green or red Peter, that's not your health score in your account. No.

Peter Armaly: 18:42

There's always nuance to everything when I talk on podcasts and webinars most of my. When I'm thinking about who the audience is, who I'm speaking with, I'm talking about senior executives. I'm not talking about the people doing the work because, they get it. The people actually doing the work, building health scores, monitoring, driving adoption, enabling customers. understand the nuance of all this stuff. It's the senior executives. I'm sorry to say I'm from that world, too. They don't have the patience to listen to their teams, talk about things like that. and I'm not sure how to figure that out because they're all busy people an oracle waves to have this battle senior executives didn't like health scores because they said, oh, well, sales people don't like it. I don't care. This is information that's accurate about customers. And that was our argument. It doesn't matter what the salespeople disputed or not. This is what's really happening in the customer environment. it's ongoing friction all the time. at the end of the day, Talk about optimization. I think having a health score or some sort of mechanism that continually shows you the progress they've made or are making towards achieving their ideal or desired outcomes is vital. If you don't have that information, I don't know how you can Confidently say, we're going to have a renewal from this customer You don't really know how satisfied they are. They could have filled out a survey and said, yeah, I'm happy. But that doesn't mean anything because the financial buyer might be getting information from the team saying we're really struggling. You can't just look at Reported cases. You have to look at a multitude of factors that together sum up what the customer's situation is and then you can figure out what their propensity to renew is. optimization. Is not something you do in the last 2, 3 months before the renewal. It's actually something you have to do all through the whole process to make sure that that last 2 or 3 months is a bit of a no brainer. Customers already figured out. Yeah, we have to keep going with these guys because we've already made progress. We're so close. And actually, we kind of like working with them why don't we talk about some of their other solutions, and maybe deepening the partnership. That's where services people should be marching towards. It's that sort of conversation with customers.

Kevin Metzger: 20:56

The truth is going into the last two or three months, You should already know, the renewals are already, we're negotiating the details of the renewal at that point especially on large complex systems, I think on some of the SAS implementations where quite frankly, changing costs aren't as high, you know, the cost to change aren't as high, that's a little bit harder But if you're, if you are doing a bit, if you truly have a solution, that is a value add to a business, then you should be having those conversations all along. How are you achieving that? are you achieving those goals? If you're having those conversations consistently, even in a low changing cost environment, you'll know, coming into those last 2 or 3 months.

Peter Armaly: 21:45

Yeah, Kevin. I've been in situations where customer success was not responsible for the renewal. There was a renewal team and a sales organization that responsible for renewal and the two never talked really. And so you'd have customers getting within the last year or 6 months, they started getting hammered by a renewal team saying, okay, here's the new contract. the renewal team had no knowledge really of the experience the customer has been having for the 2 or 3 years before. That I think customer success would be asked at the last minute. Help us justify the renewal. Yeah.

Kevin Metzger: 22:24

some of the things that I've seen successful on that is. My CSMs, whenever I have a team of CSMs and a separate renewals team or a separate sales team, They need to have a monthly meeting with the sales team with customer updates, talking through what's happening on all customers. They need to be in the loop because the truth is. If you're having those conversations internally, you can identify with the sales team upsell opportunities. If you're having those conversations with the sales team, you can identify the opportunity to expand it earlier You can identify the opportunity to renew earlier because you can drive all of that with the folks that are thinking from a sales perspective. here's where the opportunity is versus the folks who are doing the day to day support. Driving the implementations. If they're on task, know the stats, what's happening with the customer, have had those conversations. You can identify the issues and the risks and you can work on solutions together so that you never have the problems. Communication throughout business is the biggest thing. Whenever I've come into a business where there's not communication between the teams that are involved in driving the sales solution, you always have problems. And as soon as you change that process and drive communication, both up and down about what's happening up to the sales team, down, down to the customer success team, you drive a better customer experience. 100 percent of the time.

Peter Armaly: 23:59

I 100 percent agree with you on that. people love to. Complain about customer success, not being business savvy enough. they don't understand, how to sell and all that kind of stuff. I think. how to remediate that is what you just said. Kevin get everyone communicating, make sure there's regular consistent meetings between the teams because each of them have knowledge. That is vital to the success of the customer. I call those meetings a crucible for business transformation. they're so easy to do it's not, they can't be heavy handed, only pulling information from customer success to fill out a picture that sales needs. It has to be both ways. Customer success can learn from salespeople about how to position value for the customer over time, and I think that's a critical skill in the new world. And I think customer success is doing it a service. If they try to continue to kind of divorce themselves from the sales organization. We in customer success love to say we need data from sales, but we're not as willing or kind of thoughtful about what can sales use from customer success. I think it's a 2 way street and Kevin, the way you just described it. I think that's perfect. it requires a lot of consistency from senior executives to make sure that kind of environment is in place.

Roman Trebon: 25:24

I think Peter, you've given us a new topic because there's the value of regional teams in general, I've seen them turn into glorified procurement teams, right? Because it becomes less about value more about numbers and hammering it out. So anyway, I can't add that to the list as we as we move forward. So but as we get to the end here, Kevin, any more questions for Peter, before we get into the hard hitting questions,

Kevin Metzger: 25:46

Peter, we tend to ask our guests about AI in general. I'm a huge proponent of, I think the opportunities with AI coming into, Basically it's what's happening. we've got to figure out how to integrate it. Any thoughts on. Opportunities for integration within the customer lifecycle process. I think there's places all over the place, but what are the thoughts on it?

Peter Armaly: 26:08

Yeah, I embrace AI too. I use it almost every day. Just as kind of a, I wouldn't call it a source for ideas. It's more like a collaborator. I use it as like a personal team mate. I'll say I have this experience. I, I'm thinking of writing this paper where should I think about expanding in this topic and that kind of stuff? huge fan. I'm not afraid of AI. I've been an AI fan for a long time. I saw Jeffrey Hinton speak 10 years ago in Toronto. So I've been a big Nobel prize winner as well. Yeah, that's just amazing. You know, at Oracle, I mean, I got to say Oracle takes a lot of criticism from people just being kind of a sales kind of entity, but they've got really smart people combining processes on the services side support is really transforming, understanding customer case patterns and all that stuff. So these machine learning in a big way. I've been a big fan of AI and customer success. I think what's missing. Still, I think some people are thinking about it and actually doing it, but I feel like there needs to be a stronger kind of, and I'm not a big fan of the word bureaucracy, but I think customer success operations is still a undervalued kind of piece of the puzzle. I think. You know, encouraging your teams to experiment with generative AI is good, but you have to be careful as a leader to make sure that it doesn't become unproductive. I'm a bigger fan of having more expert people responsible for centralizing activities or templates and usage that would drive more efficiency across customer success organizations. You have to remember the roles. Customer success managers are not meant to be experimenting all the time. They're meant to be delivering value to the customer at the moment they need it. You can't waste a ton of time figuring out. Oh, what should I try now? So I think the, you need a team of people who are more strategy minded, but smart technically to work together to build the right kind of processes. templates and usage guidance for things like generative will help the entire organization. I do think a, I will replace a lot of the kind of mundane tasks that customer success managers do today, which is usually around search, putting together information about a customer. I think I will drive. Fast improvements in CRMs. finally, I have this dream that AI will be the way we're going to melt or disintegrate silos in large companies and I think it's just inevitable that there won't be any, it's going to drive a lot of change around senior executives organizational change and everything, because you can't resist the speed efficiency and effectiveness. Of automation companies that remain stuck will probably go away because they won't be able to compete with the immediacy and the speed of companies that are more embracing of delivering value in a faster, more effective way to their customers. So that's how I see it, Kevin.

Roman Trebon: 29:20

this is great stuff. All right, Peter, we've come to the rapid fire section of the podcast, right? So, so buckle up here. Here's the, the tough, the tough questions. All right. We'll start with this early bird or night owl.

Peter Armaly: 29:33

I am an early bird. Undoubtedly.

Kevin Metzger: 29:37

do you enjoy cooking? And if you do, what's your favorite thing to cook?

Peter Armaly: 29:41

I do enjoy cooking and I'll just qualify that by saying I enjoy cooking on weekends when I have time. But I guess I'm not a creative cooker. I follow recipes. My wife does most of the cooking, but I enjoy it. I find it really meditative. I like to listen to podcasts or watch the news at the same time. My favorite kind of cooking, I think because it's more complicated, is Asian cooking. I think it's just because there's so much chopping and measurement and all that kind of stuff.

Roman Trebon: 30:14

It's very, very therapeutic. So Peter, you're up in Toronto. If Kevin and I make a road trip up there, what's the one place we have to see and where we get a bite to eat?

Peter Armaly: 30:24

Wow. That's a great question. I got to come to see me. I'm right downtown and I'm not going to mention like any kind of Michelin star restaurant, but I'm going to mention like a local restaurant. We call it our family restaurant. It's called Mercado Cantina. It's just a block away. It's Italian food. We love it. Staff is fantastic. And the food is fantastic. it doesn't change all the time, but it changes enough to keep it interesting for us. We were shut down, like, a lot of places were shut down for quite a period of time, but they had a program called table for 2 and you would order it online. You go pick it up. It's just Fridays and I did it every Friday and I would come home and prepare the food and serve it and all that kind of stuff. So they got to know me that I would walk in and be like, George from cheers. Yeah, they would say Peter

Kevin Metzger: 31:14

Great Do you have a book recommendation? Right now

Peter Armaly: 31:24

my book that I wrote mastering customer success. besides that one I would say a map of the new normal by Geoffrey Rubin. Geoff Rubin, the map of the new normal. he's really macro stuff, like, what's happening in the world and why the world's never going to be the way it was a few years ago. We just have to get ready. It can be a very scary topic for people, but I like thinking about big macro forces and how that affects my life and the people around me and how we can prepare ourselves as a society, as businesses and as individuals for what can happen next.

Roman Trebon: 32:07

Yeah. I love it. All right, Peter, last question. Where can our audience find more about you value wise? Where can they go? check you out.

Peter Armaly: 32:14

Yeah, so I'm really busy on LinkedIn. There's LinkedIn addicts. I guess I'm one. I'm on it all the time. I take it very seriously. I goof around a little bit on LinkedIn, but usually in the conversations or the comments, I like to have a little fun, but I post. A lot. Usually every week. So find me on linked and there's tons of content within my profile. I've written tons of articles over the last 20 years. Lots of videos value wise also we're very active on linked and you'll see what we're all about. And we talk about the, we're really focused on the customer life cycle, trying to help companies optimize the customers. Journey through the life cycle. And so we're not strictly about customer success. We're actually across the entire post sales experience.

Roman Trebon: 33:01

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining us. This is an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it And for our listeners, if you found this episode helpful please don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and share this episode with your colleagues and network. You can also find us on LinkedIn. I'm at Roman Trebon. You can find Kevin at Kevin Metzger. We also have our customer success playbook page. So check us out. Let us know what other guests and topics you'd like for us to have on. And as always

Kevin Metzger: 33:29

keep on playing.