CSP S3 E8 - Keith Hanks - Match the Actual Customer Profile

In this thought-provoking episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, Keith Hanks challenges conventional wisdom about customer profiles. He emphasizes the importance of understanding and adapting to actual customer profiles rather than rigidly adhering to ideal customer profiles (ICP). Keith shares valuable insights on establishing effective sales feedback loops, leveraging experienced sales representatives' knowledge, and creating realistic, replicable customer success stories.

Detailed Analysis

The episode delves into several critical aspects of customer success management and sales alignment:

Sales Feedback Integration

Keith emphasizes the significance of involving sales teams in the post-sale process, particularly during onboarding and quarterly business reviews. This approach serves two purposes:

• It ensures accountability for promises made during the sales process
• Creates a valuable feedback loop for refining future sales approaches

Historical Knowledge Utilization

The discussion highlights the often-overlooked value of experienced sales representatives as organizational historians. Their deep understanding of successful customer relationships can be leveraged to:

• Improve customer success strategies
• Guide newer sales team members
• Enhance the overall customer experience

Customer Profile Reality Check

A crucial insight emerges regarding the verification of marketing materials and case studies. Keith advocates for:

• Thorough analysis of long-term product users
• Understanding struggling customer scenarios
• Validating marketing claims against actual customer experiences

Implementation Strategy

The episode outlines a three-step approach to improving customer profile alignment:

1. Data analysis across cross-functional teams
2. Investigation of user behavior patterns
3. Verification of marketing materials against real customer experiences

Practical Applications

The discussion provides actionable strategies for:

• Conducting effective onboarding handoff calls
• Establishing regular cross-functional communication
• Creating realistic, achievable customer success stories

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Transcript

Kevin Metzger: 0:05

Hello, and welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzger together, as always with my cohost, Roman Trebon. And this is one big question. Our Wednesday segment with Keith Hanks. On Monday, Keith shared his number one tip on the differences between developing the ideal versus actual customer profile. If you missed it, be sure to check out that episode. Roman, it's week three. This is our eighth episode of the year. What do you think we get to know a little more about our guests and before we jump in?

Roman Trebon: 0:43

Yeah,

Kevin Metzger: 0:43

Kev,

Roman Trebon: 0:43

let's do that. You know, last season, we did, uh, these hard questions at the end of the show. Keith, we're going to ask you a couple, uh, not about ideal customer profile to start. Okay. So I know you're not, we didn't teach up for this, but first question, right? These are the hard hitting questions, Keith. Favorite

Keith Hanks: 1:01

movie. Ooh, this is embarrassing. I absolutely love the 1999 Cruel Intentions. If you remember in the 80s Dangerous Liaisons, it's based on that. They made a Cruel Intentions 2, a 3. They even made a musical. My wife got me tickets to it. I absolutely loved it. There's an Amazon series. I have not watched that. It is such a guilty pleasure and I hope my kids do not discover that movie or that storyline. Well, I

Roman Trebon: 1:33

will admit I used to have a huge crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar, so I know that's Cruel Intentions, right? So I'm putting that out there to the public domain as well. Reese Witherspoon is my hall pass, and if

Keith Hanks: 1:41

my wife ever gets to meet Jon Hamm, I just have to look the other way. It's an agreed upon thing.

Kevin Metzger: 1:46

How about, how about a book that you would recommend?

Keith Hanks: 1:49

So no one probably knows of this book, but it is so simplistic. It's this book called Fish. It's got an exclamation point in it. This book, it came out about 20 years ago and it's about change management and it's basically about this like accounting department out in Seattle. It's this really toxic environment. It's really boring environment. And over the course of going to lunch at Pike's peak and seeing all the guys throwing the fish at the Pike's peak fish market and how they work together. It's these like mundane jobs. It stinks. There's fish. It's. cold, it's wet, but these guys are having fun. They're loving life and they're, they're learning how to play. And what I love about the book is it talks about sort of the, the impact of company culture and this impact of how you could take jobs that might not always be what you want it to be, but with the right spirit, the right attitude and the right culture, you can turn it into something really interesting for everyone involved. And Let's be honest, um, until the bots really start helping us in customer success and we get out of this, all this data management and Excel and Google Sheet update stuff, I think that's a message a lot of teams could embrace.

Roman Trebon: 3:01

All right, Keith. Now, we hadn't meant to get to know you a little bit better, and neither of those were our one big question for the week, okay? Like Kevin said on Monday, we talked about the actual versus ideal customer profile and how teams usually work really hard to get sales teams to change how they sell so they can match the ideal customer profile. But you think about this a bit differently. Can you

Keith Hanks: 3:24

explain? I've seen this across different, different companies, different organizations, different industries across the last 20 years. The pattern is the same. Companies, organizations, we want our sales teams focusing on new logo acquisition. We want to do that handoff. We want them going back to new logo acquisition. We want our product marketing department helping support that. We want our product team thinking about that. And a lot of times I feel like we, some of our organizations, we take the customers for granted. So as I said before, there's a phrase I live by, love your customers, but tolerate your prospects. Person that said this, he was CEO at a company that came out, became CEO the year I was born. And I, to this day, it still resonates with me that that phrase, and I have a few suggestions about how you can think about ideal customer profile and turn it into actual customer profile. And the first suggestion is to establish a sales feedback loop. And there's two important components to this. The first is the importance of that initial onboarding handoff call. In general, you're going to have your salesperson. That team has sold the vision. There's a e signer, there's a stakeholder on the other side, an executive sponsor on the client side. They're bought in. However, all the folks on your organization and all those new users on their organization about to get on boarded, they weren't part of this process. They're not necessarily bought in. It's a directive and it can frankly be disruptive if you're one of those client contacts, it can be scoped to what you were probably already had a full full plate. So inviting the sales lead to be part of that kickoff So you're here, the salesperson reiterate the vision. You're hearing the stakeholder rear division. Both teams are hearing this. Everyone's meeting to me. That's a really big thing, but the check and balance of this, and this is how you really help iterate and take your actual customer profile and improve your ideal customer profile is. And if you can have your sales team sit on that first EBR or QBR, and the importance of that as a check and balances, this is that chance to reiterate those goals that was part of the E sign that was talked about in that, that, um, kickoff call. And this is a chance to be able to say, did we get there? You know, these are the realities because twofold, it's going to hold your team much more accountable. Because they're going to be there. And two, it's going to be a feedback loop for your seller to be able to hear how they sold. Are they setting it up for success or maybe there's some refinements or some yellow flags that they can use in future prospects. So

Kevin Metzger: 5:58

one of the

Keith Hanks: 5:58

things

Kevin Metzger: 6:00

that I heard, actually a couple thoughts as you were going through there, one of them was bringing the sales guy into the kickoff meetings around, which I think is great. I also think it's very important not just to bring the sales guy in to the kickoff the post sales meeting, but bring. The CSM into the sales calls early on so that they're learning what the objectives are early on as well, because I think that helps with alignment. I think another thing that's huge, you talked about feedback loops with sales is. On my teams, I always ask my CSMs to have a regularly scheduled meeting with their sales team about what's happening on the clients, whether it's an expectation that was set during the sales that maybe we can't meet as a company or whether, uh, a client saying this was an expectation, but sales guys like, well, I don't know that that's really what the expectation was that way I interpreted, this is what we thought was happening. I love the idea of the feedback loops, right? Because if you're doing the feedback loops and working cross functionally with the teams, you start growing alignment within the company, between the sales teams and the ops teams and the implementation teams and the onboarding teams that gives a better overall customer experience. It's. From the very beginning of how you set expectations all the way through delivery and how you deliver on the expectations that were set. So I think that's such an important point that you made. And I see how you're talking about an alignment from the ideal here to the actual. Any other thoughts on how the actual customer profile feeds back into the sales teams or anything like

Keith Hanks: 7:42

that? So a couple more ideas around this. One of the benefits of involving sales like this is you're going to get two flavors and two looks. Now your account executives in a lot of these organizations, they are some of your most de facto historians that are underutilized and under realized. So you basically have two types of sales reps. You have folks that have been there for a real long time. They've perfected their craft. They're very, very good. You're going to have some new folks that are more newer emerging. And more often than not, if you go through this ACP analysis, you're going to find that the quality of account and the chance of growth and renewability and serviceability It's going to be very different depending upon if you're getting one of those, those newer reps, as opposed to if you have the ability to have one of those more seasoned reps. So in that way, by going through this exercise, you actually, in a way, end up oddly getting sales to talk to sales, but you're doing it through customer success. So you're getting the benefit of that. Experienced seller, all that history and you're absorbing it into your CS organization. And then you're using this as a teachable moment to some of those, some of those newer sellers as well. And this is all in the vein of improving longevity, health success. It becomes a feedback loop for them because a lot of times we find that those more experienced sellers, they don't interact as much with some of the newer ones. Um, you know, it's very. Actually, if they're in

Roman Trebon: 9:10

an IC type role. Keith, this is great stuff. So if you had to boil it down for, and I heard, I just read the other day, people love lists. What are the three takeaways for our audience? What were the three things you would say, if you're going to get anything out of this, do these three things based off what, what, what you're sharing with us.

Keith Hanks: 9:25

So the first and foremost is getting in the data, get to learn the data, get to learn those traits, try to establish an internal cross team, if you can, to be able to do that again, ideally, you've got a business analyst, you've got representation from sales, representation from marketing, obviously a person from customer success, and if you can person from, from support as well, you're going to learn a lot there, but just the realities of today from there, where I want you to go is I want you to take a look at. Okay. Some of those personas that are in your actual customer profile and how those users behave. And I really want to, when I say this, do not neglect those users that are in the product. I really want you to look at the folks that have been in the product for over a year and that are like your power users. And then I want you to kind of look at a few folks that maybe are struggling a little bit. You know, maybe they're a new hire at your client side and they came in after onboarding. That's a tremendous use case. But the third piece here that really stress tests this is. I want you from a C. S. Lens. I want you to look at your product marketing materials, and I want you to look at those drop in slides. Those case study slides that are used in acquiring these customers, and I want you to stress test it. And I want you to take a look and say, is this real? And if you're working for a company Brands itself is having a self service platform. This is incredibly important because you ideally have those drop in slides, but then have an internal, call it, um, sales enablement, product enablement, however you want to describe it, version of this that has the cliff notes about how did you do it? Were there other service engagements on there? Was this pure self serve? Who are the people? That, that helped this on the team. Are they still in the company at this point? Because what you're really trying to stress test is these case studies and these examples that we're putting out there that to attract our ICP. Is this an outlier or can this be recreated? If it can be recreated, you want to work with this internal task force to put as much content as much approach in there to help educate your other clients and users. On how they can do these things. And you can do this through your knowledge bases. You can partner with product marketing to do webinars. Um, you could possibly at an account level, just do open office hours, a lot of ways there, but, um, really stress test and see, can those case studies that you prop up, can they be recreated and

Kevin Metzger: 11:58

how I love it. Thanks. This was awesome. The discussion on using the ideal versus actual customer profiles, not as quite as transparent as you might first suspect. So thanks for helping us understand why. On Friday, we'll be wrapping the three part series up by talking about how AI can assist in building the customer profiles and help make decisions about how to use them in your business. Until next time, keep on playing.