The Customer Success Playbook
Welcome to “The Customer Success Playbook,” a fresh podcast initiative spearheaded by Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon. Immerse yourself with us in the dynamic realm of customer success, where we unravel the latest insights, inspirations, and wisdom from recognized leaders in the Customer Success domain.
Our journey began with a simple yet profound belief: that meaningful conversations can significantly impact our professional trajectory. With this ethos, we’ve embarked on a mission to bring to you the voices of seasoned and revered professionals in the field. Our episodes have seen the likes of Sue Nabeth Moore, Greg Daines, Jeff Heclker, James Scott, David Ellin, and David Jackson, who have generously shared their expertise on a variety of pertinent topics.
We’ve delved into the intricacies of Profit and Loss Statements in Customer Success with Dave Jacksson, explored the potential of Customer Success Platforms with Dave Ellin, and unravelled the role of AI in Customer Success with all guests. With Sue, we navigated the waters of Organizational Alignment, while Greg brought to light strategies for Reducing Churn. Not to be missed is James insightful discourse on the Current Trends in Customer Success and Jeff’s thoughts on Service Delivery in CS.
Each episode is crafted with the intention to ignite curiosity and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement among customer success professionals. Our discussions transcend the conventional, probing into the proactive approach, and the evolving landscape of customer success.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a newcomer to the industry, our goal is to propel your customer success prowess to greater heights. The rich tapestry of topics we cover ensures there’s something for everyone, from the fundamentals to the advanced strategies that shape the modern customer success playbook.
Our upcoming episodes promise a wealth of knowledge with topics like CS Math, Training, AI, Getting hired in CS, and CS Tool reviews, ensuring our listeners stay ahead of the curve in this fast-evolving field. The roadmap ahead is laden with engaging dialogues with yet more industry mavens, aimed at equipping you with the acumen to excel in your customer success journey.
At “The Customer Success Playbook,” our zeal for aiding others and disseminating our expertise to the community fuels our endeavor. Embark on this enlightening voyage with us, and escalate your customer success game to unparalleled levels.
Join us on this quest for knowledge, engage with a community of like-minded professionals, and elevate your customer success game to the next level. Your journey towards mastering customer success begins here, at “The Customer Success Playbook.” Keep On Playing!!
The Customer Success Playbook
Customer Success Playbook S3 E29 - Marcelo Calbucci - Strategy Focus
Summary: In this engaging episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, hosts Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon continue their deep dive with Marcello Calbucci, exploring how organizations can successfully integrate the PR FAQ framework. Marcello shares strategies for overcoming resistance to change, emphasizes the importance of writing in fostering critical thinking, and explains how the PR FAQ process can help teams kill ineffective ideas early, saving time and resources. If you're looking to drive smarter innovation and enhance your customer success playbook, this episode is a must-listen.
Detailed Analysis: Marcello Calbucci returns to the podcast, bringing valuable insights into how organizations can effectively adopt the PR FAQ framework. The conversation kicks off with a few light-hearted questions, offering a glimpse into Marcello's personal interests, from travel aspirations to his favorite Seattle hotspots.
The discussion then shifts to the core challenge: how can organizations embrace the PR FAQ framework, especially when they are used to traditional presentation methods? Marcello emphasizes starting small—choosing a contained project that allows teams to practice and refine their approach. He underscores that this iterative process helps organizations learn, adapt, and eventually drive better innovation outcomes.
Key insights include:
- Why top-down mandates for new frameworks often fail.
- The value of piloting the PR FAQ with smaller projects to refine the process.
- How the PR FAQ encourages cross-functional collaboration and reduces siloed thinking.
- The role of storytelling and clear writing in fostering better strategic thinking.
- How the process naturally weeds out weak ideas, saving organizations time and resources.
Marcello also introduces the concept of the PR FAQ's "three superpowers": enhancing critical thinking, fostering clearer articulation of ideas, and inspiring teams with a vision that feels tangible and achievable. He stresses that while the writing process may feel daunting, it's a powerful tool for sharpening ideas and ensuring everyone is aligned.
This episode is not just about adopting a framework but about reshaping how organizations think, collaborate, and innovate. If you're striving for better strategic clarity and stronger customer success outcomes, tune in and learn how the PR FAQ can be a catalyst for meaningful change.
Now you can interact with us directly by leaving a voice message at https://www.speakpipe.com/CustomerSuccessPlaybook
Please Like, Comment, Share and Subscribe.
You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
YouTube - @CustomerSuccessPlaybookPodcast
Twitter - @CS_Playbook
You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.
You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.
Welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzger, alongside my cohost, Roman Trebon. We're continuing our series with Marcello Calbucci about the PRFAQ framework. Roman, let's have a quick round of fun questions to get to know Marcello better. Marcelo, before we dig into the
Roman Trebon:one big question, we have to give you a couple smaller questions to get to know you, to kind of ease you into that one big question. That's great. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. Where is one place you would like to visit that you've never been?
Marcelo Calbucci:Yeah, I haven't explored Asia much, and I would love to go to Thailand. Nice. Any particular reason why, Marcelo? Love the food, love Thai food, uh, heard beautiful thing about the scenery there, you know, the ocean and everything there is, is wonderful.
Kevin Metzger:Yeah. It's a place that's on my bucket list as well. So Marcello, what, what city are you, do you live in?
Marcelo Calbucci:I live in Seattle.
Kevin Metzger:So if we were to visit Seattle, what is the one place we should visit and one place we should eat?
Marcelo Calbucci:Yeah. I'm going to have to say, you know, you have to visit the Pike Place Market, uh, in Seattle is. One of the spots for tourists there, but it's a lot of fun, a lot of places to eat and to hang out and to have drinks as well. So. It's fantastic. Marcelo, is that where you, they throw the fish? That's where they throw the fish. Yes. And I used to work near there and it was great to go to the market to, to have lunch every day.
Roman Trebon:Oh,
Marcelo Calbucci:I love it. I
Roman Trebon:love it. Yeah. It looks cool. I've seen those fish getting thrown. I'm like, I got to check that out at some point. All right. Do you have a, uh, not your own, but do you have a book, a TV show or a movie recommendation that you consume lately that, uh, you want to give our audience a heads up on?
Marcelo Calbucci:I watched the two seasons of Silo. on Apple TV. Uh, I don't know if you've seen. It's a fascinating, dystopian future where people live underground. It's interesting. It's worth watching. I love it. All right. So check it out, our audience.
Roman Trebon:All right. Get ready for this one big question.
Kevin Metzger:Yeah. So our big question today, how do you drive the PR FAQ into organizations where we typically use presentations and how do you see this in a customer success function itself?
Marcelo Calbucci:I think this is not a question about PR FAQ, right? This is a question about adopting any new framework. How do you change your way that organization is doing something? And I can tell the wrong way of doing that is to try to make it a top down mandate or like organization wide mandate, or like, Tomorrow, everyone is going to be doing this way. The best way is probably like to pick a smaller project, right? A small initiative that is more contained, you know, a smaller number of people in smaller scope and like length of three months or so that you want to experiment because the first time you use the PRFQ, you're probably going to do it wrong. So you need to do like two, three times until you get a sense of it, right. And they start to extract value. So if you're going to get it wrong, uh, or not. Perfect. You better contain it a little bit so people give it a chance. In terms of customer success, really, the PRFAQ is for any type of innovation within an organization, right? So customer success teams can use the PRFAQ to propose new programs or even new features for the product, right? As long as they involve all the stakeholders, all the teams on it and make it part of the process of writing this document, you can get a lot of traction with it, right? And one of the problems that exists in many organizations is this silo scenarios, right? Like you have teams that are not working well with other teams and they throw documents over the wall and like help that the other team listen to them. And then the other team like throw another document back. That's not very good collaboration. The PR FAQ naturally is a very good collaboration doc, right? Uh, it's contained, it's very focused on the strategy, not on tactics. So you don't have a plan there, so people can't be debating about dates and details of the features. It's always like vision and strategy that, that you want to discuss. And it helps team align, right? So once everyone is on board with vision and strategy, then you have a north star that everyone can rise towards it.
Roman Trebon:I love, like you said, it applies to anything, right? Start small before some big top down initiative. For companies that you've, you've helped kind of implement this with, what's the biggest challenge teams have? And even if they start small, is it, is it doing the storytelling? Is it just so out of their norm? Curious, kind of the feedback from teams that. Want to adopt this. They understand the value of the storytelling, but there may be, there's so many years of doing the PowerPoint, hiding behind the visual, et cetera. I'm curious what challenges you've
Marcelo Calbucci:seen. I think people are afraid of writing, particularly on this day and age. It requires some practice, but it's not that hard because you're not writing a novel and not writing a romance, right? You're writing with facts and data and elements that you're familiar with. So you just need to get from your head into the paper or do some basic research Put on the paper and go from there. So that's one thing that I seen people having resistance. You know, to adopt an APRFQ. The other thing is, they say, well, if I write, no one is going to read it because people don't read six pages of document anymore. And to that I say, that's not necessarily true, right? Because if you can convey the information in a way that becomes very valuable, it might take a little bit of convincing to tell people like, hey, read the six pages, uh, and tell me what you think. But once people read that and they see the value that is there, they're going to start adopting that because It's more intense than a PowerPoint where you have to keep interrupting and asking a bunch of questions and you leave a meeting feeling like you understand but you really don't understand versus when you're reading a document that you can point to exactly the line that you say like I don't understand this line here.
Kevin Metzger:Yeah, I know as I was reading the book, one of the things you were talking about is the process of writing out the idea really helps you also think through, understand what you're trying to communicate much better than. Then being doing something at a high level and, uh, in, in a PowerPoint or something like that. And I'm sure I'm positive. That's one of the benefits that you're going to get out of going through the process, right? You've just taken the time to actually think out your entire idea. What are some of the other benefits that. Really, you're getting out of this process besides kind of truly understanding the idea that you're trying to communicate other benefits from a communication standpoint, are there benefits?
Marcelo Calbucci:I say like a PRPQ delivered three superpowers. Um, one is thinking critically because when you're writing, you activate a different part of your brain than when you're creating a presentation or diagramming something or going to the whiteboard or speaking. Right? So you're activating a part of your brain that is more powerful. So, like you said, writing helps that narrative and thinking critically. The second thing is really articulating an idea. Once you write, you feel the need to write a coherent story. Like, it's not a story that jumps around. Like, you feel the need to do that. So you keep refining it. And this process of refining helps you better tell the story, even without the document. Right? And for the people reading, they are more Clear on what is in the document and more likely to repeat what is on the document, right? So one of the measures of a good idea is like how people can articulate that idea to someone else who wasn't sitting on that meeting, right? And the PRFQ is much better for that than a presentation. And the third aspect, um, is that the format is very inspirational. Because you start from the press release, like you don't start writing from the press release. You write the press release last, but when people are reading, they read the press release first. And reading the press release is almost like you feel the future is here. Like you are like getting really inspired by that. It's not a press release you're going to send to the press by any means, but it's a press release that you feel like, oh, wow, it would be really cool if we did that. So people really engage in the conversation in, in trying to figure out like, how can we make this a reality? I
Roman Trebon:would think, Marcella, and keep me honest here, but I would think as you go through this exercise and you start to really hone this in on that, kill ideas soon so you don't waste time on them, right? If there's not value at the end, like, you're probably, and I'm sure that's frustrating maybe for some people that get into this, and you're like, oh, maybe this isn't such a good idea, but there's value in that, in my opinion. You're not wasting time on things that don't
Marcelo Calbucci:have impact. I think that at least 50 percent of the PR FAQs that are written should be a no go. Because, like, you discover, like, the problem was not important enough, or the opportunity wasn't right, or the market is saturated, or it's not really a severe problem for the customer. You know, like, the customer said they have this problem, but once you went to investigate, it wasn't that big of a deal for them. So, like, saying no to ideas is super important. I love that.
Roman Trebon:Yeah, no, I was going to wrap up. You got another question from Marcella before we we segue into uh, uh, Friday's tease.
Kevin Metzger:I think mine was a little bit of a Friday tease. When you talk about really working with the fact that it's 50 percent you think should be cut, right? This is, you know, one of the things that organizations are finding as they go into working on new product with AI and all that kind of stuff. One of the big recommendations that's coming out is come up with all your ideas, but then 90 percent of them need to be thrown out as you're starting to build out these, these new AI products, because they're really not going to provide the benefits that most people are that you were looking for. Right? You want to drive your benefits out of there. And I think. But the process and the product, the PRFAQ itself tend to, to actually provide an actual, that framework for doing that, whether it's a new AI process or whether it's, it's something else, it's a great tool for being able to see the value in what you're delivering. I think this is fantastic and excited to, to move on to the, uh, the Friday episode. Roman, you want to take us out?
Roman Trebon:Marcella, thanks so much. This is our one big question. You knocked it out of the ballpark. That was awesome. You are coming back Friday. We're going to dive deeper into how AI and new technology trends can influence the PR FAQ approach. I am curious about this because I, um, I am super excited about the PR FAQ framework because I think it really hones in on critical thinking skills. And I, I wonder if AI is diminishing, maybe some critical thinking skills. Don't give me that scowl, Kevin. So we'll talk about all of this on Friday's episode. You're coming back to our audience. Make sure, thank you as always for listening. Make sure you subscribe, like the show, comment on it. That helps us grow our audience. As always, Kevin, keep on playing.
