Customer Success Playbook S3 E49 - Joe Di Grande - Tech Touch

Ready to rethink your approach to customer success without draining your budget? In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger sit down with Joe Di Grande, founder of Joe DE's Tech Touch, to demystify tech touch strategies. Joe shares practical methods for building a tech touch framework even when your data is scattered and your budget is tight. You'll discover how understanding your goals, auditing your current data, and leveraging freemium tools can set the foundation for scalable and impactful customer success initiatives.

Detailed Analysis: Joe Di Grande dives into the evolution of "tech touch" — from a basic method of handling long-tail customer segments to a full-fledged strategic pillar within modern customer success playbooks. He emphasizes that success doesn't start with the fanciest tools but with a clear understanding of your goals and the data you already have. Joe cleverly outlines how even spreadsheet-based strategies can kick off a winning initiative if you keep your eyes on key lifecycle markers like contract dates.

Resourcefulness takes center stage as Joe highlights a roster of budget-friendly tools — including Zapier, Apollo.io, and Tango.io — that can empower even the scrappiest startups to automate engagement and education touchpoints. By focusing first on aligning data and customer lifecycle stages, organizations can set up low-cost experiments that yield big insights and pave the way for future investment in tech success platforms.

Whether you're a startup looking to stretch every dollar or an enterprise recalibrating your customer success operations, this conversation offers a refreshing, grounded take on scaling smartly. Joe's energy and real-world examples make this a can't-miss episode for anyone seeking to modernize their customer success playbook with tech touch strategies.

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Transcript

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Kevin Metzger 0:05

Customer success.

Roman Trebon 0:10

Hello everyone and welcome to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Roman Trevon. Join, uh, with me as always as my co-host Kevin Metzker. Today we're talking tech touch, uh, without the hefty price tag. So we'll get into what tech touch is, what that means, and, and how do you rule it out. Kevin, happy Monday. Uh, you excited to go, uh, on, on the Tech Touch week here at the Customer Success Playbook podcast?

Kevin Metzger 0:36

Absolutely, and I'm excited about our guest. We've got Joe de Grande. Did I pronounce that right, Joe? Yeah, that's it. That's perfect. Thank you. Founder of Joe DE's, uh, tech Touch. He helps, uh, companies like e-marketer and Business Insider Drive significant retention gains. Joe, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you here.

Joe Di Grande 0:57

Awesome. Thank you Roman. Thank you Kevin. I appreciate it. Uh, happy to be on.

Roman Trebon 1:01

Yeah, Joe. Well, let's get right into it. So, uh, can you explain to our audience what, what are we talking about when we say tech touch? Like what is tech touch? What is a tech touch strategy? And once you do that, what is your number one tip for launching a tech touch strategy? Uh, especially if you don't have maybe perfect centralized data, or maybe you don't have a big, massive budget of tools to roll something like this out.

Joe Di Grande 1:26

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. So Tech Touch originally started as a, uh, a segment of customers and really, when I say a segment of customers, you're long tail. So a lot of businesses, uh, took kind of the B2C approach where like Mark, you know, marketing, uh, operation scenes are. How they communicate with the customers, right? If you subscribe to Netflix, you're not going to be communicating with account manager. You're gonna get standard marketing messaging through automation and so on. So that approach is kind of what was taken into the tech touch world. And then focusing on long tail, because again, long tail is typically a lot of customers by volume, but a cheaper, you know, a RR annual contract value, however you define it in your org. Now it's kind of shifted to an actual strategy itself. Now what does that act actually mean? So the use of technology, uh, to manage your book of business. Um, and that could be from email automation. Now even ai, it could be the way you have a customer portal or knowledge base. Um, it can be. Anything that you're using to scale the way you interact with customers and provide value, um, is essentially tech touch and even now more commonly known as digital customer success strategies as well. Um, mm-hmm. So that's a little background as far as now when we're trying to keep in mind, um, budget. Right? The biggest concern with companies are a few things. One, if they don't have the tooling, two, the data. I would say take a step back first and focus on the goal that you have in mind, right? Are you trying to focus on a long tail segment of customers? Or maybe you have, uh, high touch customers that are larger accounts with large user bases, and you need to make sure that they're being taken care of as well. Um, so figure out what that goal is. And that could be anywhere in the life cycle. It could be onboarding, implementation, it could be even renewals. Focus on that, figure out your KPI, then. Understand your data. That's my first recommendation. And understand one, is it siloed? That's number one. Is it living in different systems? Which odds are, if you have any concerns, probably is, but. Then understand is it being update? Who's updating it? Is it a rep or is it an actual system that's updating it? Right? So is it basically the end users going in the product and they're labeling their, their title or their user persona and that's getting sent to, let's say, your backend data warehouse or your CRM in the best case scenario, or is a, a account rep, whether that's a CSM or a sales person during that transition process that's updating it maybe on an opportunity or a deal or. Some sort of custom object and that's more so inputted by, you know, a human now. Figure that out first, then see how you can leverage it. My always recommendation is at first, if you could even, I'm not a big fan of spreadsheets initially, you always want it going to a CRM or a customer success platform. But to start, it's okay. You know, break it down and then figure out what you can actually trust and then seeing how you can, you know, leverage it for either automation. Um, in this particular example. And in addition to that, the, you're gonna also want to make sure that you tie that into your initial goal. Um, you could even break it down as simply as contract dates. That's always my best recommendation too, because I. There's always a start point in the contract and the end date, and there's always gonna be certain stages that should be happening during that time. If you have those two key things, you could pretty much start to experiment with a tech touch model. Um. Keeping it in budget. Tons of freemium solutions. Actually just posted something on LinkedIn today on this. Um, you know, first evaluate what you do have in the organization. Odds are a lot of teams don't realize that you could do this with marketing technology, sales enablement, SalesLoft, outreach, and then again, marketing automation tools, et cetera. So check out those. If you don't have that, maybe you're a really, you know, scrappy startup. See what's out there. There's one Zapier. I heavily leverage it for my business as well for automation. Their PO copilot is amazing to setting up those workflows. In addition, that there are some free solutions like Apollo do, uh, io, where it's more of a sales engagement platform that's automated, but. You can leverage it for those same touchpoints. I mean, there's tons of, you know, freemium marketing solutions as well. And if you wanna talk about from a actual, like an education standpoint, knowledge base, there are even solutions that will track your steps in order to create that documentation. One I actually leveraged quite a bit was tango.io. It was previously named Tango Us and that was great as well. So there really are tons of ways in which you can. You know, launch something at a low budget to also prove that value down the line, uh, to invest in more tooling. But initially just focusing on that business case first.

Kevin Metzger 6:15

So Joe, just to kind of break it down, really, I think what I heard you saying is you wanna identify kind of what your problem is, identify what your current process is, where that data is, and then look at how you can use a tool to kind of potentially automate or facilitate the process. Is that really, and that, and that's kinda your high level tech touch strategy. That's the breakdown. A

Joe Di Grande 6:39

hundred percent. That's the, the best way to put it. At least to get started, that's for sure.

Roman Trebon 6:44

Good. Well then you're coming back, Joe, on uh, Wednesday, right? We're gonna, we're gonna dive in a little bit more. You're gonna be talking about a, oh, uh, uh, an interesting topic, a bloated tech stack, right? How do cus companies get here and what you can do if you find yourself in that situation, we'll get more in this tech touch. I, thanks for defining it. I hear all these. I've heard digital touch. I've heard tech touch. I'm glad we're all using the same vernacular, which is, which is awesome. To our audience. Make sure you subscribe like the show. If you subscribe, you'll get notifications, and so when our Wednesday episode is released, you'll get a little notification. You can check it out. You'll know when our episodes come out. Uh, come out throughout the week, Joe, awesome job. Again, Wednesday's one big question, focusing on how companies can avoid wasting money on bloated CS Tech stacks, and how can we fix that problem? Don't miss it. Until then, Kevin, keep on playing.