Gal Biran: How Base Is Turning Customers Into a GTM Force Multiplier

No human can really manage 150 accounts in a very detailed manner. AI is going to take some jobs. That's the reality we're seeing and happening. Treating it as a unit and just thinking everybody's in exactly the same place every time. It's a recipe for disaster because people are not. Why don't we look at customers as partners? Why don't we build programs around making sure that we encourage the behaviors we want from our customers. At the end, your customers are a force multiplier or any one of those pillars and go to markets influencers don't have to be Kim Kardashian. It's great, but she's expensive instead of asking for something, coming with proof, coming for results. Especially with AI now, the world is a canvas, even kind of build or create any program. This is Growth Funds. We are back. After nearly a year of not posting long-forming interviews, I missed this forum. I missed the deep conversations. I missed the context. And in the middle of walking only be described as a content dumpster fire because of AI, I think this real honest conversations become even more important. And your first episode back, I am talking to Gao Behran. He is the co-founder and CEO of BASE, the customer marketing automation tool for B2B companies. The reason why I wanted to talk to Gao is that he's company BASE acquired one of my very favorite customer success products ever after. If you are a subscriber often use letter, you probably have heard me talk about ever after in the past in the context of success plans. I think success plans are one of the most underutilized high-leveraged tools in the toolbox of the CSM. It's how we got our customers through the value realization journey and do a proactive way. And ever after powers that motion with a ton of cool AI tools to help teams scale, this is not an ad. I am generally a fan of ever after and I was curious about the future of the company now that they have been acquired. I wanted to dig into this vision for how customer marketing and customer success connect as BASE and ever after connect as one business. The synergies that Gao sees the motivated the acquisition. And I will say the dis conversation delivered. So without further ado, here's my interview with Gao Behran, the CEO of BASE. Hey, Gao. It's so great to have you here in the This is Griff podcast. Welcome, welcome to the podcast. To get us started off, how about you introduce yourself to our audience? Who are you? What do you do? Sure. First of all, thank you for having me, Daphne. And it's exciting to be here. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a company called BASE AI. We recently also acquired a company in the customer success base called Ever After. I've been in the customer space, customer facing programs and customer facing initiatives for basically all my kind of professional career, always meeting customers working with customers and excited to talk about everything customers. Yeah, and honestly, I was so excited to have you here live. I know we had a conversation preparing to have these official recorded conversation. And we're talking to so many interesting topics that I know our audience is going to love. But again, before we dive into deep, how does somebody like yourself end up in the world of customer experience? So what was like this moment that made you realize that you want to be viewed in this space? Yeah. So for me, it wasn't just one moment. It was kind of in a quick accumulation of journeys or things that happened. But generally, I worked at companies such as Microsoft, I worked at startups. I was always like I said, customer facing and always working both with customers and partners. So always kind of thinking about these different personas or different audiences that we work together with or serve as vendors. And at some point, it just built my own company and agency that was kind of helping companies with their customer initiatives. Because I saw so many times people try to get customer stories from their customers or try to build the right kind of reference flow for their customers or try to create some kind of onboarding program or co-marketing program with partners or key customers. And these were all initiatives that I just started to support them building as an agency. And at some point it was like, we should productize this. There has to be a way to make it better and scale it. And that's kind of where one thing led to another. And at some point, you know, I had this semi-a-ha moment way, hey, why don't we look at customers as partners? Why don't we build programs around making sure that we encourage the behaviors we want from our customers to get them to better adopt, to better grow, to better leverage our product and also hopefully spread the word about us and become advocates. And we build some kind of partnership relationship where there's something in it for them. And it doesn't matter if that thing is giving them more access, prioritizing their product requests, giving them the ability to meet with executives as a cab member or an advisor, or even giving them gamification and rewards or free tickets to your events. But making it more of a joint partnership and join go to market also with customers versus, you know, they are the bio, you are the seller and that's kind of how their relationship looks. So yeah, we build around that. I love that so much. We talk about customers as partners in customer success all the time. You know, and we want to be seen as partners to our customers. We don't want to just be another vendor. We want to have that deep relationship. We want to be embedded in their organization. And I love the idea of using gamification and incentives to drive that because there are layers to that partnership, right? There is multiple personas. There's, you know, different relationships you have to nurture and different interests. So I love the idea of actually using incentives as a tool to get the customer moving forward in whatever journey they are part off, whether they are an end user or champion and executive in the business like that is such such a cool concept. And you just acquired ever after, as you said, ever after is a really beloved product in the customer success community. I would say, I'm a big fan. And I would love to understand what is the vision, you know, of the base and ever after coming together. What is it that you are trying to do? What is the opportunity that you saw? Well, so yeah, we're super excited about this acquisition. First of all, because it's an amazing team. And you know, it's always great to bring in a team that's strong and can help build better and faster and whatnot. But I think there's kind of elements that we look about at the industry which are more macro shifts and then micro shifts, if you will. But on the macro side of things, I personally think that AI is starting to create some kind of convergence between the go-to-market apartments, domains. So if you think about sales, marketing, customer success, and even product, I would kind of argue, for many years, they would work at silos. They'd have their own methodologies, their own blueprints, their own systems, their own data. And this is starting to break from numerous reasons. First of all, because it doesn't make sense at all, it was built like that, I think more because of structures and politics versus what's the best interest of the company or the customer. But beyond that, because AI is so, for AI data is so important and you can move so fast and you can hyper-personalize all these things require a much more structured approach to how you engage with your customers, right, or with your partners. And when we think about that, so for us, we look at, okay, where are some of the border lines that these departments are going to collaborate much stronger, where are some of the areas where we believe that we're going to see much more the flows of, you know, engagement with customers and customer experience are going to be more cohesive. We think that customer success and customer marketing who have been working together anyway for the past years are going to be one of the first places where these things are going to be much more streamlined, right? So on the macro side, we believe that there's going to be a shift in how companies go to market, a shift where they try to create a sensor, a single source of truth, a better way to engage your customers. And for us, part of that journey or the first part of that journey is between customer marketing, customer success and all the customer programs if you think about it. So advocacy program, reference programs, communities of program on digital onboarding or any type of onboarding, ongoing QBRs, all of those are customer facing programs and we think they could be combined and that's the first element we bring the customer marketing program side of the house ever after brings the customer success side of the house together we create a, um, both a platform and also framework that helps make those experiences, those programs more seamless. So that's more in the macro side. When you think about a little bit more in the in kind of the details, ever after built amazing product with AI around, for example, vibe coding, a specific customer experience or creating different elements that are very unique per customer, per account. And that is something that we thought that is very unique. We didn't see it anywhere else in the market and we thought that that would be a great add on also from any eye power to everything that we're building. Yeah. I know that when we prepared for this conversation, we talked a little bit about like this evolution of moving away from apartments and those kind of rigid structures into a sexual orientation. of programs that are deployed at different stages in the customer journey, depending on behavior or depending on where they're at, depending whether they have a new stakeholder that joins in, et cetera. Can you pack for the audience that way of thinking because it's very different than what we're used to. We are used to free sales, poll sales, like that very, very structured approach to basically passing the baton between the teams. Yeah, in fact, for us, like how does thinking about the sector's program changes the way CS teams work and how we should be thinking about the structure of the customer journey? Sure. So I think the first framework for us is what we define as customer-related growth. When you think about, you're right, there's pre-sales and post-sales, but at the end, pre-sales and post-sales is a continuum. Sarah from company ABC was a prospect that's of pre-sales. She went through the entire sales journey and eventually she became a customer, that's the post-sale. It's still Sarah, still company ABC. The fact that in your CRM, she changed status, doesn't change anything else really for her. I mean, it's part of her journey. So that's kind of the first thing and we need to apply those kinds of first principles of, hey, we're working with companies, we're working with people, with contacts, and we're working within their journey with us versus, you know, and it kind of should be built around that. Also, when you think about the revenue pillars, so when you think about customer-related growth, we talk about, hey, there's acquisition, you know, and you want to bring in, you could, like, how do companies make money, right? Doesn't matter what field they're or domain they're in. They're either getting new customers acquisition or they grow the existing customers they have upslick, cross-slick, expansion. And of course, they need to retain those customers kind of, you know, so retention. Those are like the three, it's acquisition, retention, and expansion, or growth. Those are the ways to grow. And all of them are related to customers, right? Of course, expansion and upslick, you can only do to your existing customers, same goes for retention. An acquisition, well, if your existing customers help, it really makes it much easier, right? So, whether it is a referral, advocacy reviews, on review sites, comments on social, whether it's LinkedIn or ex-orreddit, like, the end-year customers are a force multiplier for any one of those pillars and go to markets because they could also help existing customers, happy customers that have upselled will help existing customers to upsell. Happy customers that retain will help existing customers to adapt better and retain. Happy customers who are, you know, again, vocal can help prospects to make that journey. So that's kind of, for me, that line of pre and post-sale needs to be much more looked as as a continuum versus like, you know, there's a border and this is here and this is there. And then post-sale, it goes even more detailed because there are so many things really when customers are in their original resale journey, there's really only one goal. They're in them into a customer, like, they're a process. Yes, you bring them to an event, have them listen to a webinar, whatever, but at the end, really like book a demo, but at the end, you just want them to buy your product. When customers become customers, there's so many new programs and there's so many new personas because on the customer side, there's more people normally once they made a decision. Yes, buying committees are big, but users are even bigger. On the company side, it's also bigger because mostly on the pre-journey, you have sales and marketing, talking to the customer, post-journey, customer success, sales are still involved, marketing should do marketing to existing customers, product comes in and wants to get product feedback and whatnot. Leadership comes in because they want cabs or they want to have ask questions or whatnot. So there's more personas and more departments in the organizational side and more personas and more departments or users on the customer side, it becomes way more complex. And there you have many more programs and that's where we've seen a lot of things break because then again, product would run potentially a, hey, we need people to be beta customers or give us feedback separately from maybe customer success who would look for people who are, I don't know, leading a user group separately for marketing, looking for a speaker and sales looking for a reference person. And all that can happen the same week to the same account, maybe even to the same contact. Not a great experience for the customer and probably not that great for the company. I'm laughing because that resonates so much. I've been in both the giving and the receiving end of that experience of being targeted with five different things for the same company by different people. And also, I know I've been guilty of the same because we have our customers and we all connect with them and we have all these, the same, what you said about the betas, the event, the ask for the favor of being a reference call that like all this stuff can hit at the same time, never mind when you have other things like a CSM trying to draw the adoption, whether it's a pricing change, where there's, you know, so there's just so much that that happens. I haven't glad that you touched on this, this point of the persona based. And I think usually when we think about customer success, we have this, this behavior, this attitude of thinking about the account and the account as a unit. But sometimes we forget that inside the account that are many different people and I usually use the example of HubSpot, you know, being a customer platform, you have sales reps, support reps, sales managers, customer success directors that you have so many different people that have different objectives in the product that are in different places in their journey. And, you know, treating it as a unit and just thinking everybody's in exactly the same place every time is a recipe for disaster because people are not and if you try to speak to them like they are, it won't resonate. So I know we've very, very briefly talked about AI, but like I feel like this is one of the things that AI is going to be good at, right, as this complexity. One, I want to ask you specifically on this, like how do you think AI is going to impact this, but even more broadly, are there other places that you see AI having a big impact in the customer journey? Yeah, for sure. First of all, yes, I think we need to think about accounts and contacts and I think and this I come mostly from the marketing practice. So, you know, we think in marketing, we think a lot about personas and ICPs and all these kind of, you know, ideas of we need to target specific people with specific messaging. And I think this is the time where now everybody could adopt it. It doesn't really matter if it's customer success or sales or marketing or product that if I have a customer, right, and in that customer and that account, I have 12, 15 different contacts. There's a lot of differentiation between them. Number one, what is their seniority? Is this a VP versus, you know, a user number two, where they in the journey? Are they maybe the companies within for a year or for two years, but this person just joins. So he's literally with me for a month. Like, where are they in their journey? Then what are they trying to achieve? Most importantly, what is their outcomes? What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve? And then comes, you know, another layer of personalization, which is just what are their preferences? Do they communicate through Slack, through email, whatever, you know, for portals in app? Do they come for events in meeting person? They don't, you know, win so on. So when you think about all those aspects, there's so much personalization that couldn't should be done. And personalization is not a goal. It's a means. The goal is to get your customers to behave or complete the journeys that make sense for you and for them together with your product or if you're offering. And personalization, ideally, allows you to just get better behaviors, better completion, better adoption, because it just resonates better with the person that you're asking to do something. So that's why personalization a little bit is important. And you have to go to that detail. And then to your question about AI, yes, personalization was very hard or harder when you didn't have AI. But now you could literally know everything about that customer, that person. So you could think about it's not just the data about the account. Yes. Of course, we want to know the health score and how active they are in the product and all the telemetrics for your important. But then what is their title? What is their role? Like you mentioned, HubSpot. So are they using HubSpot for sales? Or are they using HubSpot for marketing? That's number one. Then, you know, are they the leader, the director, the VP or one of the users? And then, you know, how do we make sure that they, if they're a salesperson, that they know the new features they could leverage or if they're a marketing person, that they know that they give us feedback or whatnot. So how do we take each persona through those journeys? AI allows us to really log all that, including their preferences, including understanding account, very detailed account and contact level data. And reaching out to a point where you could say, yes, I can reach out one of the things we always say, you know, with customer success and customer marking flows is that if sales or marketing needs a customer, they would go out to customer success many times and ask for approval, right? And say, hey, you know, can we use this customer? When customer success thinks that accounts, they would say, well, we use this customer last week. We can't use them again this week, which is right. They should protect their customer. But when you think with AI, not so much as account, you think it kind of accounts in context is like, yes, we use this customer last week, but we use Sheila last week, this week, we actually, what they're need a daily Josh. So we're like, it's not a problem. We can do that again, probably. So being able to in a very minute manner, understand and see the data, but also personalize the outreach. And it's also going to be relevant. We're going to ask Sheila something that's relevant for her. Maybe Sheila doesn't like being a beta customer. She doesn't like answers surveys. She doesn't like, we're not going to ask her to meet product. It's not her thing. But Josh continuously on the community gives us feedback and says things he wants to see and gives. So we're actually going to turn him into a maybe product supporter advocate versus, you know, somebody that speaks publicly. So AI allows us to gain all those insights and then create the right kind of outreach and the right personalization. That's in the personalization layer. On a more detailed layer, I think it just allows to scale. Listen, we're all super busy with AI wherever it's easier. CSM sometimes have 50 or 100 or 150 accounts to manage. Like, no human can really manage 150 accounts, you know, in a very detailed manner. But I allow you to do that because it allows you to create a lot of the personalized outreach, a lot of the signals to see which one needs tendons now, a lot of the understanding of what's the next best action in that journey for that account, for that contact. And from a customer perspective, they feel like they're getting that tender, loving care, that treatment that they should. But for and from CSM or any person in the company perspective, you could really engage and activate each individual customer in the right manner, but it's scale. So AI allows just so much more scale, so much more insight, so much more activation, so much more personalization, and so much more unique experiences that it's just, it makes it much, much better, I think, for the customers, and also much better for the companies. Yeah, I love that. You said two things that I think every single customer successfully, they're right now thinking about orchestration, personalization. How can you use AI to treat every single customer like they were the only one? You know, they can know them deeply. You can speak to the thing that they're trying to do, the the objectives that they have, the job that they need to do in their organization. So I think that's the promise. I will say that I'm yet to see somebody doing this really well, right? And I know every time we talk about, you know, customer journeys, so many times like the journey looks perfect in the in the presentation, yeah, on paper, you know, and you, you could obviously be very hard, but you could draw like three, four different personas and their journeys, et cetera. But those journeys always fall flat, because at the moment you put them in the real world, customers don't move in a linear fashion. They go forward, they go backwards, they move sideways. So things don't always go as planned. But you know, one thing I wanted to dig into you, we talked a little bit about programs, we moved into a, yeah, I want to go back to programs because when we were having our prep call, you gave me some fascinating examples of customers that, you know, base has, that you've seen actual innovative programs that they're deploying throughout the customer journey. Can you share with the audience what are some of these programs? Yeah, for sure. So I'll share some, I would touch before that because I think in RelayTay, we'll talk about the journey, just one more thing. Somebody gave me a great analogy, which is, you know, think about crews and I've never been in a cruise, so, but it sounds like it makes sense. So, I mean, someers go on a cruise, right? And, you know, you would think, as soon as it goes with their journey, you would think that they would just, you know, today we stop in whatever grease tomorrow, we stop in this island, and you have to, one hour to see the restaurants or see and come back to the ship and what, but some customers say, you know, hell with that. I want to stay in this island for two days, you know, I don't care about your cruise or whatever your agenda. And they would stay there, right? And in a way, what you want, when you think about those on-paper customer journeys, is to have enough flexibility, say, this is the journey that we want a customer to go. But if it takes a week or a month, as long as it progresses, maybe that's okay because that's what the customer wants to do and makes sense for them. And if we have three stops or seven stops, maybe it doesn't really matter that much as long as we get to that goal. And right, and if they stay in this place longer than we thought that they need only one hour for this course, but they took two hours for this course. Okay, being able to have flexible journeys with, yes, afraid, you know, think about it as a, this is our overall journey and these are overall steps within that journey and our overall goals, but how different customers, how different people go through that path can differ, maybe 10% up or down, maybe 30% up or down. It's fine. And again, AI allows us to build that in that. That's I think with the big gap between a lot of the programs we build and we'll connect to programs and a lot of the things that we think when we put on paper journeys because we think everybody is the same. They're just not the same. So the programs and the journeys will never work the same for the same for all people because people are different. But then when you think about those programs, so when we, when we see some of these programs that our customers are building and I'm always surprised like with the innovation, I think, you know, the ideas come from them versus from us, but I'll give some examples. So nice for example, they're in the context center. One of their great programs is actually connecting product to customers. When you think about how is product communicate with customers normally was, hey, we need somebody to maybe to interview or you know, we might want some beta customers. And what they build is this entire continuum between community and feedback product and kind of a feedback loop. So customers can ask for features and you know, feature upvoting in the community. We all know that sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't work because you don't listen and you don't respond. So nice kind of iterated and asked, hey, we want to listen and we want to respond. So the feedback from the uploading the requests from the community go all the way to the product team go all the way to their Gira, you know, then they kind of decide what they do and what they don't do. They look at the upvotes, they look at the comments, look at what people say, they respond there and in their Gira, they work where they work and then it goes all the way back to the community. So breaking the silos, product can work where they work. Customers can be where they are, but there's something in the middle that that connecting tissue that allows customer to request at scale product to respond at scale. And everybody to have transparency and see, oh, this we accepted this we did it. This is now in beta, this in progress, this is released. Like and then think about the next layer. If you want to run some kind of an upsell motion, you can say all these people who wanted this product or this feature, hey, now can reach out to them and tell them that it's live and potentially upsell them or have them adopted and so on. So that's a program where you connect communities and product teams and thought of no longer really need to run. They still run surveys here and there. They still do depth interviews, but much less because their whole stream of, you know, they ask customers, these are the five things we can do a AI this month. What do you prefer? Or this is kind of give us ideas of what you need and so on and so forth. And it just a continuous discussion between product and customers, which is very unique, I think, in that sense. And so that's one example, another example, constant contact is envisioning a program where they have customers, support other customers in rewarding. They work with SMB's, not every, you know, every company has its own, you know, kind of ideal ICP, but for SMB's mom and pop shop sometimes onboarding to a new product is just hard because hey, they don't have time. They need to run their shop or whatever. So I mean, but if you bring in another, and if you have a CSM that's anyway busy in managing so many accounts or can't really dedicate personalized onboarding for every customer, that's hard. But if you bring in another mom and pop shop just across the street, you know, in the same potentially, you know, either in the same industry, but not competing maybe a different city or in the same city, but a different industry that are using already this product, they can come in and say, hey, this is what I started when I started using constant contact. This is how I ran my first campaigns. This is how I did my first things. This is what you should do. This is what you shouldn't. First of all, there's more trust because hey, it's somebody from the business that they're talking business language and not selling me a product. And secondly, they know what to focus on and what not. They understand how to run a business but still build new programs and new tools. So they frame it as a mental program. You basically have mentees, new customers, mentors, experienced customers. And these experienced customers are mentors, but for a very specific use case, they're mentors for onboarding. They're mentors to help you get onboarded on a new product. And they even get rewarded for it because hey, instead of putting resources like dedicated CSMs, we can put resources like our own customers that help us bring. So that's another exciting and amazing programs. We've seen customers do programs around, for example, companies like Aqta really creating new experiences in vibe coding, a lot of the journeys on onboarding, where their customers are, hey, let's create goals. Let's break your onboarding to three, four, five steps and what do you want to achieve? What is kind of how do you start and then how do you advance and then what does great look like? And you don't have to be great at day one. It doesn't, it's hard to be great at day one, but if in 12 months and six months, whatever the time I guess, let's build that continuum. So they built a journey and it's not an onboarding journey because onboarding is only kind of the first step, but then you can onboard to the next step or to the next level and until you become great, until your company is covered with everything. And within that journey, they have elements of hey, maybe you need because you want to reach those goals, you might need more products mocked so they can upsell, but also within that, they little by little take the customer to better adoption, take the customer to better utilization of their product, bringing more groups from the customer, and they've vibe coded those those steps where there was like, this is how an experience looks like for an Aqta customer in this industry and these products on step one. And then this is how it looks like for that Aqta customer in step two. And so these are just some of the programs we've seen customers use Adobe uses influencers in universities and colleges to bring in other people to leverage Adobe products. So you know, we're in an day and age where everybody looks at influencers, right? So why not businesses leverage influencers and influencers don't have to be Kim Kardashian. It's great, but she's expensive. So like let's think about something different. And people who actually use your product and people who are peers like a pharmaceutical student using Adobe and other students using Adobe or again, if I'm an expert using HubSpot and other expert using Hub. So I think there's a lot of creativity that could be done. I think that's what I'm trying to say, whether it's product teams or you know, trying to find influencers, whether it's prosumers or consumers or of course, B2B companies, we need to think about what are the goals we're trying to achieve. And especially with AI now, the world is a canvas and even kind of build or create any program. It's really up to you to think what would make the most value for my company and my customers. Yeah, and that's definitely And I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. are endless. You can do so much now with technology because you know you used to have to buy stuff really off the shelf and now with AI it's possible for you to build some customization on top of your programs. I have to say like when you talk about bringing in customer's closer to product I think that's a really exciting prospect is also really scary right. If the product team is saying we're not going to work on this thing and suddenly it was an important customer and you need to massage that message to make sure it lands in a certain way like I can see why people have a little bit of anxiety but in general I think it's such a valuable thing to be able to not just tell customers give give us your feedback but actually show them that your feedback matters that it's being integrated into how we work and doesn't feel like a black hole anymore right it feels like a collaboration and it goes back to that word partnership that you used and the other example that you gave with like customers helping customers on board like I cannot tell you how much I love that example because you know also hubspot to SMB is a big part of our cohort of customers so I have a lot of experience working with small businesses that don't have resources and they want to cut corners they just want to learn like how do I do this thing in a way that other people are doing and seeing success let me just get off the ground quickly and and just keep moving because my business really depends it's life for death for my business how quickly I can move through this so so much of this resonates and like I said it genuinely feels like the possibilities are endless so my next question for you is a little bit on the prioritization side of the possibilities are endless how do people decide the which programs to invest in like is there framework that you recommend that you use for people to assess where to start with with this yeah and I think you know I'll say there's two frameworks that are important in my mind the first one is you know understand your company's goals and what you're trying to achieve and connect it to that without that nothing works I mean you could you could envision any creative program but if it's only creative and great but it doesn't tie in any way to company goals and outcomes it won't last in one work it might you know so the first framework should be let's reverse engineer from the company goals right if the company goals are these five things we're improving retention we're trying to get more people to adopt AI products where trying to you know what we're hoping to penetrate into the European market where you know whatever those three five company goals are start reverse engineering from those and thinking about okay which customer programs can I think about that help move that or example right if we want people to adopt more AI what would be the best way to do that do we run AI focus groups or AI you know champion program or AI user groups where customers teach other customers in person you know in Baltimore they meet together in a coffee shop with five laptops and run that maybe I don't know making it up but I'm just saying based on the company goals that is the most important way to decide which programs should we focus on first because if programs don't tie to revenue don't tie to outcomes it's going to be very hard to justify them especially in this day in age and the second thing or the second framework is we've had a bit of chat of that would be between you know how people maybe more so in customer success than maybe in marketing but this you know fear of failure so the second framework is just experimentation in marketing experimentation is inherent come from hotspot AP testing is something every marketer kind of knows right so basically we're saying we don't know what's going to work we're going to try version A we're going to try version B and one of them is going to do better great we'll choose that one and yes in that process we're going to make a mistake we're going to run version A and 100 or a thousand customers only to find out later that version B is better so what so the idea of an AI in a way encourages experimentation every CEO every CCO every CMO all the executives are talking about hey we need to adopt more AI we need to use it more what what is adopting AI if not experimentation you know you try to I haven't found it found yet somebody that on their first chart of AI got what they wanted I mean yes maybe when you ask Chechipiti and you get the right answer not even then always but when you try to build your own GPT or when you try to kind of customize it to do what's in your tone and voice where it's always experimentation so when companies they adopt AI basically where they're saying experiment right what is that like go experiment so the frameworks from when you think about prioritizing customer programs are number one how do those programs tie to company goals and number two how do I experiment in a way that I can basically in a relatively short time get to the point where I'm seeing that connection to the goals I'm seeing some you know early success as long as you focus on those I think it's much easier to decide what you do and what you don't because if something is very well tied to goals but you can't envision a way to roll it out with experimentation you can't envision a way to kind of take it you know to test it out then maybe that soon be your first voice and vice versa something you can experiment but doesn't affect goals well why do that yeah and I think that this fact was very bullish thinking about experimentation it's something that's new for customer success you talk about failure a fear failure and I think that's the right way of of looking through this because it feels like it's so high stakes if it was because it's your customer because they are paying you because they can decide to cancel you know that there's like such a high-stakes situation so I will add one thing to what you said and I really love like that scientific mindset I would also say like start small you know the the idea of an experiment isn't like a complete ringvention of your entire go-to-market engine you're in that it like it starts small like if you do one a b test you're going to follow one path and then you're going to have an option b have a tight hypothesis a very controlled environment test that small thing if it works great move forward if it doesn't divest or learn from it go at it again but do it in small pieces think that that has been a really game changer for me and my team and how we think about how we transform ourselves that the idea of transformation is that like it's this big bang you know you come out and everything is different the reality of transformation is like a million steps a million iterations and yes in two years you look completely different than you looked two years ago but every day it just doesn't feel completely different so I definitely add that to it totally agree we have started small and I would say you could entrust your customers so when you say start small some of the things we tell our customers is hey are you having a pilot program so let's say you were you're launching again a community or an advocacy program or an onboarding program doesn't matter which customer program you're launching are you starting small with including five ten twenty five doesn't really matter customers that you trust they would love to be part of that closed group that could influence this program and you get an opportunity to basically launch it then say hey we're thinking of launching this we'd love your feedback we'd like you to be like a beta customer for for the program so it's not a beta customer for our product it's a beta customer for our program and you know we're thinking of a cab would you be and and basically saying and iterating with customers and starting small even if you do a cab so maybe I talk to two three customers first I get their feedback I get their understanding of what they're willing to do how they've seen other cabs work and run with that and you don't have and only then kind of oh let's launch a full blown cab and whatever so I mean yes starting small for sure and starting small by trusting your customers and leveraging them even in the early days yeah gal she's doing years a little bit customer success leaders are being squeezed for budget I mean I don't think it's just customer success leaders I think everybody's being squeezed for budget right now but I think one of the things when we talk about programs the exciting part of programs is the scalability of a program right you can get more juice out of your budget you know but obviously there's some difficult trade-offs that say as leaders need to make if they're putting that those resources into a program they're not putting into headcount and or not putting into into another thing that they could be investing on what do you think from a digital success perspective like what do you think can be very successful like what are some of the trial-and-tested things that you think is worth is worth putting the budget behind so first of all it's always going to be that balanced right even before the age of AI there was okay but if we bring a tool you know yes one person maybe needs to be the tool owner administrator but still that tool ideally helps us scale and we need less people so yes budgets are limited and in some cases you have to kind of define or decide do I rather have a person doing this or do I rather have system tools AI whatever doing this in some cases you need a person in some cases maybe AI can do it I think the the priority should really be like we talked earlier where do I see the most impact and where do I have the most challenge so again let's take the example of onboarding I mean onboarding is always going to be a scaled approach unless you're selling you know millions of millions of dollar contracts in each time and kind of doing a very bespoke implementation for your customer as long as you're in software, software, service, or even other elements, there's some kind of element of scale, right? So how do I create, you know, same as education, by the way, learning, when companies have their academy or university and they try to take customers for learning and what is the purpose of learning? The purpose of learning is that they know how to use your product better, they adopt better, they get more value, but then they stick with you hopefully more. So I think the priority should be where the programs that we have the most scale, so we're touching more and more customers, whether it's accounts or contacts, but you know, we're scaling and we're short resource, right? So normally on boarding teams, they're not gonna be like 100 people, right? You know, so how can we scale on boarding? And we've seen a lot of success with that, where companies are now talking, when they talk about digital success, when they talk about scale CS, one of the first programs is digital on boarding, because again, normally on boarding teams are small, but you have to onboard a lot of customers, that's where this makes sense to bring in more tooling, invest in that, even if it means sometimes, okay, I'm gonna lose one person, but in that cost of that, head count that person, I'm gonna have a tool that solves for scale, right? And it's always, I wish it wasn't a world where you have to say, okay, it's this or that. And you know, some people are trying to picture as if you know AI is not gonna take any jobs, which you know, AI is gonna take some jobs. That's the reality we're seeing in happening. It's an unfortunate reality, I think, but it is, leaders need to think about, which are the jobs that people make most sense, which are the jobs that I need to scale. And you know, based on that kind of say, okay, which head count, well, I'll give an example for marketing. So one of our customers, they said, well, we had a content manager, somebody who wrote content, that was a job up until, you know, six months ago, that CMO decided, she said, well, anyway, I need to review the content after that content person does it. AI anyway helps you write the content. I could save that salary or that head count and move that money somewhere else. I'm not giving that money away, I'm not giving that budget away, but I'm moving it to a tool for a program, another hire. I'm shifting my hires, I'm shifting my focus, I'm shifting where I need strong people versus where I need strong tools. - Yeah, I love that point. I think it's not push and pull. We're all going through it. We continuously have to ask ourselves, like what is the best resource to solve this problem? Is it going to be human? Is it going to be technology? Is it going to be a mix of blend of both, which most likely it's, you know, we're in a very human business in customer success? - I want to wrap up with one final question that I think can help the audience, which is, I love your advice for leaders who want to do this, want to experiment with programs, initiatives that vacuacy, new motions and customer success, but they are maybe facing organization resistance, they're maybe paralyzed, you know, in analysis themselves. Like what's your advice for them to get started? - Yeah, that's common and I think the, it goes back to kind of, you know, experimentation, starting small like you mentioned. So the best way to get buying in every case is not just customer success as always, is really, you know, instead of asking for something, coming with proof, coming for results, right? So if I want to roll out some kind of program, what I would do is talk to customers, have them give me feedback about that. That doesn't cost me money. I don't need anything for that. And creating a whole proof point where I say, hey, this is what customers told us. Many times when leaders need to get approval from other leaders, right, it's always that internal, or when employees and teams need to get approval from their manager, from the leader, the internal discussion is much harder, or whatever reason, but the external discussion is simpler, right? If whatever you come to your manager and say, hey, we need to do this and that. Maybe she or he will say yes, maybe no. If the customer comes to that, and I know that HubSpot is a very customer-centric. If the customer comes to HubSpot or two managers, and says, oh, this is a great idea that Daphne had, you should do that. This is why we would, as a customer, appreciate it, one, two, three, probably more likely that they would do it. So I think the first element is just not to be more bullish. Again, like we said, in the age of AI, in the age of experimentation, we all need to adopt a little bit of a more courageous, slash bullish mindset of, you know, let's build and break things while we do it, but at least let's be building and creating. I think overall leaders appreciate that. I always rather have somebody that's like building, creating, and maybe making, you know, something succeed, something's known, but at least we're moving. So I think that's one element. The other element is always leverage a customer, always leverage external voices. So when you come with those ideas, don't come by yourself. Try to create a coalition, and ideally create that coalition both with internal people. So if it's something strategic, you probably wanna, one by one, negotiate it with other team leaders. So when you come to your leader, there's like, oh, but these five people already said yes, right? That always helps, but also come with external, right? Hey, I also consulted these three customers, which really appreciate their, you know, their point of view. And this is what they said, or let's get together on a call. So the first part is not being afraid to experiment. The second part is coming prepared with a coalition of supporters. And the third thing I think is just tying it to goals. At the end, everybody cares about revenue. Listen, your managers, your CEO, they all care about revenue, they all care about the company goals. If you could tie the dots, connect the dots and basically show, this is why this program will help us get better adoption and save this money on case deflection, increase leads because we're gonna have advocates talking about us externally or whatever it is, but create that breadcrumb of how this ties to goals and how are you gonna measure it in six months and 12 months? It helps. So those from here, the three things, be bullish, leverage, create coalitions, both internal and external, and tie it into goals and revenue. And it should make you more successful in pushing in your programs. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. This is a really valuable conversation. I know so many of you, there's a trying to reinvent the way they approach customer success, and looking for ideas and, you know, nuggets of all information of how to do that. So I think you've delivered that for us today. And good luck with this new formed company with Bayes and Ever after, like I said, we're massive fans of Ever after and we can't wait to see what you've built together. I'm gonna be following from the side lines cheering you on. So thank you so much. - Thank you so much, definitely appreciate it. And thank you for all the content you're sharing the wisdom you're sharing with the customer success and I think with good market leaders, there's a lot to learn.