Speaker 1I want the money. I've always wanted the money. We've talked about this a number of times on this podcast. I want the money. I think, especially when we're looking at defensibility with these jobs, specifically as CSMs, and I know that there's a massive amount of CSMs in the marketplace that are going like, what is my job going to look like? Get a hold of the money as soon as you can. And I don't mean that in, maybe it is aggressive, but that's how we justify our jobs. It's accountable. And if you don't have the soft skills to negotiate and work through that, that's where you start right now. If you're not there in the next 18 months, you will be forced there in 18 months. And it's going to be a difficult conversation.
Speaker 2More at unchurned.gainsight.com.
Speaker 1Dude, this is so much better than our bedrooms when we started this thing.
Speaker 2I mean, legit, right? I know. It's great. It's a great experience.
Speaker 3Okay. Hey, everybody. Did you fart? No. Can that go in the blooper reel? No. I heard a squeak. That was me. That was not a fart.
Speaker 2I did that for social media.
Speaker 1So happy to be here.
Speaker 2Yeah. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Unchurned. I'm your host, Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Go-To-Market Development. That's the third time that I've had to do this first intro line because the laughs have already started between my very special guest today in studio in New York, John Johnson, Strategic Principal Customer Success Manager. What do the titles mean?
Speaker 1Is that? Principal Customer Success Manager on the strategic team. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You had it a little backwards. It all counts. I usually have it all backwards. Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 2Well, welcome, John. Thanks, man. And our former co-host. Yes. Of Unchurned.
Speaker 1It is nice to be back.
Speaker 2OG. You were always the favorite. Literally. I've heard that. Yes. I mean, like we would be at Pulse. This is like before you and I were part of Gainsighted. We'd be at Pulse and people would come up to me and be like, oh, you know, John's our favorite. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1I would Venmo them after they said that.
Speaker 2No, no, no, no, no, no. You have an aura. You're funnier. You're more articulate. You know, more about customer success. That is true. I'm better at the negs.
Speaker 1Yes. But being late to the podcast studio.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, don't even get me started on tardiness. But outside of that, I think you're better in everything.
Speaker 1All right. I'll take that. We have that on film. We do. Yeah.
Speaker 2And that's it. That's it, folks. That's all we. So, cool. We're going to talk about customer success, your role in customer success, what you do at Gainsight, customer success, the future of customer success, all things customer success and poetry.
Speaker 1And poetry, which is very tied closely to my belief in customer success.
Speaker 2Yeah. We're going to get a little bit in like to the human John element here. So when, you know, for those listening, if you want to, you know, I'd recommend skipping like the last 20 minutes. So what's your role at Gainsight? We know the title now. Yeah. Let's back up. What do you do at Gainsight?
Speaker 1Yeah. So our strat team encompasses the largest of the large. So these are not just enterprise accounts. These are global multinational brands that have been trusted Gainsight to run their revenue motions. My job is less order taker, QBR, support, question, and more program management. It's really looking at the entirety of what our customers are doing within our software and within their ecosystem and trying as hard as I possibly can to map as many outcomes as we can to the eight, sometimes nine figures that people are paying. There's a lot of pressure on that. There is a lot. There's a lot of pressure. Yeah. What are some of the outcomes that you're mapping? I mean, right now, the biggest focus is what are we doing with AI and how do we map to an outcome that is going to change in three to six weeks or months or even, right? I mean, in the past, it's been something that says, hey, in Q1, we're expecting this roadmap feature and it will tie to this outcome. But things are happening so much more, I guess, quicker, faster, with more energy that that needle is moving on a daily basis. So what it really comes down to is we say being the human in the loop, but it really is being in seat and aware of all of the planets that are circling around the account that you're in and making sure that everybody has as close to an understanding. We use the word alignment a lot in the past. I hate that word. That's going to continue, but that's not really. That's not really what it comes down to. It's just understanding where everything will come into alignment as things move, because they will, and they'll ebb and flow.
Speaker 2You're kind of the control tower or the centripetal force.
Speaker 1I've used the term cruise ship director. You would be more of a cruise ship director. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with the buttons and the pins and the drink tickets. And just coming off a pulse, I will say that was also my role in London last week with my customers.
Speaker 2Yeah, that sounds like a great way to get customer success, a seat at the table, is to start referring to us as the cruise ship director.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. Like, I'll bring you a coffee and a renewal form.
Speaker 2People have called you the greatest customer success manager of all time. What do you do differently, John? We're not taking any cuts here, so you better talk.
Speaker 1Okay. Thank you. I've had enough coffee for that.
Speaker 2I sent you, by the way, I sent you all the questions except for that one.
Speaker 1Except for that one. Man, I think the heart of it is there is an empathetic nature that I carry with me. And I think it does come from a lot of like my artistry and my background as like an individual. But when we're working in these large scale organizations, a lot of times people just feel like a number, even CCOs, even CFOs, even the highest people in the world. And I think if we can continually bring it back to the fact that we're not just moving zeros and ones, and it's not just the MCP, and it's not just the MCPs, and it's not just the CFOs, and it's not just the CFOs, and it's not just the CFOs. Continually bring it back to the fact that we're not just moving zeros and ones, and it's not just the MCPs, and the CLIs, and the agents, but that it's driving towards what an individual needs in order to find value and to be found valuable. I think this is the thing that adds a little bit of a superpower, is we talk about corporate and enterprise value all of the time, but again, that CFO that's sitting on a board needs to feel valuable. And if we can connect those two things to the, here's the 10 million that you spend, and we're going to get this growth, and we'll find this package, but that person did a good job and made something better for them. And if we can center on that, it gets us into that trust that we have to have when we go into this, we'll say, headless future that is going to be a little bit more autonomous, it's going to be a little bit more probably convoluted at times, and there's going to be a lot more motion. There's going to be new titles every six weeks, there's probably going to be new strategies every quarter rather than every year. So if we lose that part, that I'm a human being, and yes, I've got all these agents and these automations, and so does my customer, but we're still two people that have a goal, that have a number, that have an outcome that they need to match, we're going to get into that greatest of all times.
Speaker 2So truly human-led, I mean, you love the human element. I do. We're going to get into your poetry book. There's nothing more human. There's nothing more human than that, except the fact that you wrote it all with Claude.
Speaker 1I want to be very clear that I did not.
Speaker 2I saw an em dash.
Speaker 1I saw an em dash. And I will own my em dashes, and I have been writing my em dashes since college in the early 2000s. Okay, wow. Wow.
Speaker 2Yeah. Okay. You're a human guy. Yes. You're very, very human. You cry, you laugh. I do. You're very emotional. Some might say too much. I've heard that. No, I was just joking. I'm just joshing you. I don't know where I'm going. So you love that, the human element. How do you make the customer the hero? Because that's what I heard in your superpower.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it comes down to, I'm going to use the word that you hate, is alignment.
Speaker 2Use a different word. Can you find a different word to use than alignment? Because alignment makes it sound so corporate, and you are too human for that.
Speaker 1Yeah. Synergy. Yeah, that's good. Or corporate. No, centered. I'm going to say centered then. Okay. What's important to an individual? And what does somebody take value in? For me, it's a lot about beauty and music. Like, I've taken you to concerts. The last time I was up in New York, we went to an emo show in New York. That is me bleeding into this relationship that I care about with you, right? So finding those moments with an individual at the executive level is more than just talking. It's more than just talking about weather or goals.
Speaker 2Yeah. You ready for a human moment?
Speaker 1Oh, gosh. Yes.
Speaker 2I thought we had discussed this, but I guess we didn't. You asked me about my hat when I came in. Yes. Yeah. We're pregnant. What? Is this what? No, there's no. you're not being punked when my wife jess and i who you know i do we're we're due in mid-april with our first baby girl so i had to buy the girl dad
Speaker 1company hat i am so pleased i am so pleased josh ah so i know
Speaker 2you are such a human person yeah and i have three kids and you have three kids and you've got a girl i am a girl dad yeah so my youngest we're not going to divert this episode it's all about girl dads find tips and formulas but uh i'm gonna need some of those from
Speaker 1yeah but you're also gonna be
Speaker 2great thank you you are thank you yeah knock on wood yeah um you you've done the cs thing now for for how many years 15 years 15 years yeah and you've been part of true startups true startups like what's the smallest startup that you've been part of oh man i
Speaker 1had to go way back um i would say zinnier was a construction startup um i think i was employee under 40 in the in u.s i was first of on the cs team i got to hire a global cs organization from zero okay and then
Speaker 2you've done scale ups i've done scale ups what's the scale up you've
Speaker 1done uh scale up would be invoca we were just starting to it was actually my first cs job is when we're just starting to develop the cs like yeah model of what revenue retention looks like and i've been doing that for
Speaker 2like and now you're doing pe enterprise yeah and i've actually been in
Speaker 1the space for about 10 years so before gainsight actually it's i have to do the math so i seven years because numbers are important yeah um this is my second um i guess pe owned um organization on this strategic enterprise side kind of working with these global multinational organizations how do they all
Speaker 2differ that's a very open-ended
Speaker 1question yeah well i mean it's stakeholder management is the thing that i always come down to like people talk about numbers and they talk about teams um when you get up to this level it's less meeting with like a senior customer success manager or a senior manager of to talk about deployment and usage and it's hey i've got 4 000 csms and i need to build a dashboard that's going to be communicative to everybody so we spend i spend most of my time in what i call requirements gathering and this is just validation before we Because these are such large numbers, we're talking about thousands of CSMs across the globe that work for the company that I manage. And it's so different than, hey, here's four CSMs, and I'm just going to build my widget, and they're going to get rolling. So it takes time.
Speaker 2And you're saying when you work for the more SMBs, the startups, the scale-ups, it's smaller companies. Not only is your client—
Speaker 1Well, and the nimbleness is the word that I would say you have with that, is that you can throw things at the wall. And if they don't work, next week you have a meeting and you try something differently. When you're in these global organizations, you need approvals. People call it red tape, but it's also just validation because we're talking about thousands of people that have very different scopes and very different job functions. For somebody new in their
Speaker 2career, what's the better place to start?
Speaker 1Oh, man. This would be really hard if I didn't have the foundational understanding of what customer success is. If I didn't have the lapse in me and that ethos. enterprise in general is a more interesting space because we have bigger numbers, there's budgets, you get to run executive meetings in a very different way. So that's always going to be like where I think the power of these roles are. And even as we get further into like the AI future, I think that's where the seats are going to be more than on the SMB and, you know, scale-ups or true startup side.
Speaker 2How is the role changing from what you've observed, let's say over this year, 2026?
Speaker 1Yeah, well, they keep like giving us revenue and taking a revenue away. And like, it is just this constant, like a pendulum swing of that. But more so now, the biggest change that I've seen is the necessity to be at the highest point, the most executive level that you can. And when I remember starting out in some of my early CSM jobs, like just senior CSM or even just a basic CSM, it was like if I talked to a CCO, it was once a year in an EBR and they did not know my name. Today, because we have so much automation, because we have so much tooling that solves some of these entry-level problems, I'm spending almost all of my time at the executive level. So the higher that we are up as being that cruise ship director in those executive spaces.
Speaker 2Stop calling it a cruise ship director, dude.
Speaker 1Let's do like, you know.
Speaker 2Flight attendant. Like heart surgeon.
Speaker 1Heart surgeon. I know, but we're not saving lives here, man.
Speaker 2No, that's true. And that's because AI has helped you, as they say, eliminate the busy work and be more strategic? Or that's for other reasons?
Speaker 1I have a little bit of a sour, I'm going to say forced me to. I don't know that it has helped me just yet. Oh, because you like the busy work. No, I don't. But what I do like is the way that these tools connect dots. It allows me to not have to be on every single meeting. And, you know, we have a great relationship with Notion and our notes get thrown into a public data share so that my technical team can be on a call that I'm not on and I can query their notes. And I can get context much quicker without having to set up five other meetings like I used to have. That's what's empowering. It is that I don't have to be everywhere at all times. I am informed and I'm going to have the context that I need, but I don't have to sit in every single meeting that I used to. there's been meetings that we've all sat in as CSMs where an engineer is just going to go as deep as they can and you're lost, right? You don't even know where to start. You don't know where to begin. Now with all of these tools and this access that we have, I'm able to not worry about that. I'm able to just observe and digest and then work through it when I need to rather than just on that call. Yeah. And be present on that call rather than scribbling my little notes I'm not going to be able to read.
Speaker 2I love the fact that it still comes back to, you know me from the update AI days, the conversational intelligence note taker that we built. And still, when you ask somebody their favorite AI use case, they still go back to meeting notes. It's like the classic canonical thing.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, it's the same. We ran in-person meetings in London last week, and I had Notion running in those rooms too. Like that function of not having to scribble out what a specific KPI is and what a follow-up is and to just be present makes that, I don't have to have a two-hour meeting, I can have a 45-minute meeting, right? It's brilliant. And the way that we are able to connect all of these tools to be able to automate things into our timeline and automate things into Copilot and to kind of guide customers along when a word is spoken, not just when a CTA is closed.
Speaker 2Within Gainsight, within our CS. So the role is, I'm hearing a lot from leaders, these three branches, pillars of where the role is going. And depending on where you are, that's already kind of embedded within it. But commercial instincts, strategic work, guidance, and technical abilities. Commercial, strategic, technical. Absolutely. Are those, is that how you would characterize where the role is going more as well?
Speaker 1Yeah, I completely agree. And I'm seeing that too. That's a lot of the programs that we're building right now follow under those three pillars very specifically.
Speaker 2Which do you think will be the most impactful? Let's look at a year now or a year and a half.
Speaker 1I would like to take an eraser to the technical side. I think the idea that we can become technical takes a lot of time. And if we're doing more, if we have more, Let's say I go from 10 million to 20 million in what I manage over the next 18 months. The technical acumen needed to meet that is going to be wasted on me, right? So if we can diminish that side, I think that's where we're going is that the technical side is understanding is important. You have to be able to speak the language. You've got to have that like native industry, which is what I'm going to say rather than, hey, this is how Amazon works. It's just, no, this is what e-commerce is, right? So that industry experience, I think, is going to expand.
Speaker 2It's a little more in the strategic.
Speaker 1It is, yeah. And the technical side, I would hope, comes down. That doesn't mean we can't solve technical problems, but we're getting into this deployment model, right, where I will have technical resources that I can deploy following an FDE motion or any of these other motions that we have, whether it's an agent that I can deploy for a very specific thing. that's the process that I want to follow. And I'm more interested in refining that process so that we're getting the right information over to our technical teams, that we're capturing the right requirements, that we're not causing more work to just kind of be punted between teams, which is usually what happens.
Speaker 2You said commercial, they keep giving it, taking it, giving it, taking it away. I mean, that's what you're like the industry overall. So what's the deal with commercial?
Speaker 1I want the money. We've talked about this a number of times on this podcasts. I want the money. I think, especially when we're looking at defensibility with these jobs, specifically as CSMs, and I know that there's a massive amount of CSMs in the marketplace that what is my job going to look like? I don't mean that in a can. And I don't mean that like in an maybe it is aggressive, but like that's how we justify our jobs. It's accountable. And and if you don't have the soft skills to negotiate and work through that, that's where you start right now. If you're not there in the next 18 months, you will be forced there in 18 months and it's going to be a difficult conversation. So I have always been an advocate for wanting more of the revenue. I love my sales partners. I've got incredible account executives, but also like I want them into the green field, like that's the most important thing for them to do is how do they keep growing? And if they're spending all their time on my lawn, their lawn is not going to get the water that it needs.
Speaker 2And as we go for and Chuck, our CEO says that we're going from the SAS economy to this agentic economy, which means that consumption and usage base and ultimately outcome based pricing becomes more predominant and that consumption based pricing. I mean, that's that's perfect for for CS, right? It like then it's completely aligned to use your terminology with, you know, encouraging adoption is synergistic with adoption and and the commercials of, well, if you adopt, you use more, you get charged more. Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's going to give CS that seat at the table, as we call it, the CCO, that boardroom seat at the table. But it will take some folks having to acclimate that haven't been commercial before.
Speaker 1Well, like that term seat at the table. As always, it's it's an interesting one for me because feels condescending. It does. When I used to come when I was coming up, it really felt like I was like, I'm going to have a microphone and everybody's going to listen to me. And it's like, no.
Speaker 2And look at you now, you're on a podcast with a microphone. Everybody's listening to you.
Speaker 1Absolutely. No, it means there's a spotlight on you. Yeah. And I think if if we're going to continue to grow in any career, you need a spotlight on you occasionally and you need something that will bring you into the spotlight so that people can see your customers, your bosses, your organization can see like the actual effort and the outcomes that you're tracking. And it can't just be a Kanban board hidden behind a log in that nobody can see, like it's got to be visible. And those are the seats that we're talking about. So we're getting into this model where CSMs have actual dollars that are tied to their actual days. And then we can track just like we're tracking in our new consumption model against a goal. I am doing X with Y.
Speaker 2Yeah. And then it's not. Well, how do you know the value of the CSM of whether the renewal is because of them or because of market conditions or because. Yeah, the product.
Speaker 1Because then it doesn't matter. Then the person that is whether it's the CSM did a really good job or the market grew the the seat is the value and the management of that seat is the thing that you're bringing in. So you can then you can paint whatever you want. That's where the storytelling of a CSM comes in of like the market increased. And with our consumption price, and that also meant that we managed 10% more revenue. So that means growth, right? Like and I identified that and here's the story that I'm going to tell to my customers and to my executives.
Speaker 2I think it is both the scariest and most exciting time for CS and with more of an emphasis on exciting than scary.
Speaker 1Yeah, it depends on the day.
Speaker 2But yeah, you know, there's like this convergence of roles. Des Traynor, one of the founders of Intercom, talks about convergence of the of like the different customer roles. Yeah. So there's there's the consolidation of obviously like the tech stacks and whatnot, but also the people stuff, too. And but again, like getting closer to those outcomes, being able to be more commercial, focus more on the strategic. It's incredibly exciting right now for customer success managers.
Speaker 1I agree. I spend a lot of time in that mind space of of the excitement. And we spend a lot of time like the only flip side to that is at Gainsight specifically, we work with CSMs. So. Like when I go on site and when I meet with my customers, I'm meeting with CSMs. They're asking the same questions that I'm asking. And that's a very that's a very fulfilling place to be in, because the answer isn't one thing. It's let's just keep having the conversation. And that's where the answer comes from.
Speaker 2True or false. Oh. In 18 months, the majority of B2B SaaS software will be headless.
Speaker 1False. Headless. Yeah, I know. I saw the question.
Speaker 2False. And just to be clear. So everybody knows what headless is. I mean, it's something that we're we're fully leaned into with with CS and our platform at Gainsight. But it's basically we give you the data, the structure of the data, and you do what you need to do wherever you need to do it. Whether it's cloud, open AI, Salesforce.
Speaker 1I'm going to put an asterisk on it, but I'm still going to say false. And but I think this is really important. I think there will be elements that are headless. But I think in my space, in the strategic enterprise space, I do not see that. Horizon. I see it in a much longer horizon. What I do see is in the SMB, the mid market, even some of the like the light scale ups. They're really pushing for a headless experience. And I'm all for it. I really am. That's a that's a playground that we get to solve a lot of problems in that's going to take a while for it to like matriculate up into these big strategic enterprise organizations. And it's just comes down to security and access and data and and the the speed at which large scale global enterprises move.
Speaker 2It's interesting. We were both in London the other week for for our Pulse Europe. And I was at the CXO Summit as well with some leaders. And I polled people. Actually, you were there. You were in the front row of the crowd on the stage. They're doing the unchurned with with Emma and Sean. Yep. By the way, thank you. Thank you. Because that little gaggle right there is the only thing that I could hear on
Speaker 1stage. Those were all my customers. Those were all my CSMs from SAP.
Speaker 2No, no. You. Oh, just me. Yeah. You've got to see that right there. You've got a very loud laugh. Yeah, I envy that. Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, it's probably annoying at times, but it's it's it's very fun loving. And that's all I could hear on stage. Like over in Europe, it's a much more and in London, it's much more reserved audience. Right. So you don't get the feedback with my corny jokes that I don't know if they're like, you know, like on the edge and they're going to work or not, I get nothing, no response from the crowd except for my buddy, John Johnson. In the front row, baby. Gaggling. Yep. Cackling. Gaggling, cackling, cackle, cackle, more of a cackle whenever I attempted to be humorous. And that meant a lot, which you do often. So attempt. Yes. So so it was interesting, though. I asked that question to folks like that were more like on the front lines and frontline managers of like, well, we'll we'll we'll SAS be headless and within 18 months and you know, folks that were ICs and frontline managers, they were actually more favorable towards yes, it will be headless. Then you ask the CCOs, the VPs, they're like, no, no, no, it will not be because they need the dashboards. They do.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, and here's where I think I think there's I like to say fault, like one of the things that I like, I believe in my core is this thing that my dad said to me when I was growing up is firm beliefs loosely held. And this is one of those things that I believe firmly. I do not believe that in 18 months we're going to be in this utopian headless thing. But I do think that there is a ton of opportunity for us to build that ecosystem. And I'm really excited to see the delta between those frontline folks that are just like, give me all the tools and give me all the access and the executives that are like, no, no, no, I need traditional dashboards. I think that's where we are at as a company, especially at Gainsight, I think that's that is our market. out how this fits in that space and then help it coalesce as we move through this cycle of people saying yes and no and maybe and any of that stuff.
Speaker 2You are an anxious person. Yes. I am an anxious person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. AI is amazing. It is, yeah. It also sucks. Oh, it does. Is AI making you more anxious?
Speaker 1It used to. I struggled with, where do I start? And that led to a lot of fear, that led to a lot of that like, I just don't know what to do. I've gotten into a pretty good habit over the last six months. It's been about seven months since I've joined Gainsight. And this is kind of my first job where my company has said, here's unlimited tokens, here's Claude, we're gonna connect everything for you. - Yeah, it's great how they've really opened those gates. - Yeah, and I am pretty hesitant about AI. As an artist, as somebody who creates every day, the generative AI thing of Suno making songs that sound like a frickin' radio banger in 30 seconds when I spend thousands of dollars on my studio and bleeding hard onto poetry and people can just put a prop, I have an opinion about that. We live in a different space. -
Speaker 2Then you got some assholes that are writing books that have like their entire system of their book, like completely AI-pilled and like- Yeah, but we can tell.
Speaker 1I come back, the biggest thing for me was if I want a human to read this or interact with this, I'm going to make sure a human creates it. And that started a pretty cool path for me. The biggest anxiety for me has always just been email fatigue, like Slack and email. We have every company that I've ever talked to, whether it's Teams, your internal chat tool and your internal inbox is, it is cacophonous in its noise and its power over your life. I love that word. It's a great one.
Speaker 2It's like one of the best words. Thank you. it sounds like what it means. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1There's a word for that too. Right. But like, yeah. So I generally, I actually have not on Monday morning, I opened up my cloud console first before I opened my email, before I opened my Slack and I go, Hey, what's the most important thing for me to do? Do you really? Yeah. Yeah. Like, and by that, I mean like there's parameters. So it's like, is there an escalate? I've got a couple escalations that I'm working through right now. So it's like very specific things. And it, and the, because I have anxiety because I'm an elder millennial, because I have ADHD and all these other definitions floating around in my head, I'll read an email and then somebody will Slack me and then my kids will scream. And then I have, I'm mowing the lawn somehow. Like I just kind of go down these paths and what these tools have allowed me to do is say, I'm going to focus on this one thing and I'm going to let my little alien crawl through all of my emails and my Google docs and my Slack. I'm going to gather everything that I can and I'm going to condense it. And I'm going to, I'm going to generate what I need to out of it so that I can take an action. And then I get a fricking check a box. And there have been moments that have taken hours out of my day just to check that box because I had to dig and dig and dig. And what email was this? And when was that meeting? And what was the follow-up and this CTA here and that CTA here. And right now it's just, okay, what's next? And then the next one is, oh, this email, you missed this email 18 days ago. It's still sitting unresponded. Oh shit. Let me take care of that. Right. And then you do it. And, and that anxiety goes away. It's insane how being proactive reduces your anxiety. I'm going to say that again, being proactive reduces that anxiety. And that gets us into these high powered CSM roles.
Speaker 2It's a good point though. Being proactive also in like, in, in using AI to its fullest in creating the skills that, cause you could sit there and just be prompting reactively, but like gross, like, like you were very, I have the skills that you have too, like the daily brief and stuff like that, but I don't have the discipline to actually use them.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, this is the thing is that like most people, when they're getting these tools are focusing on the output. It's just like, oh, what can it give me? 100% of my brain power goes into the input because that little alien that's inside of these tools, however it works, like it needs to know what's inside of my brain. And if I don't put it in there, it won't.
Speaker 2And you need to garden it and nurture it. You do. Uh, okay. Let's go to the, the creator side of John. You're a wonderful musician. Thank you. You're, um, I have one of your songs. Uh, geez, what's the name of it? It's on my like list on Spotify. I keep playing it over and over again.
Speaker 1I think you're the only one that listens to.
Speaker 2I mean, I should have teed this up, uh, beforehand.
Speaker 1We'll put it in the show notes.
Speaker 2Uh, I know we're, we're, we're low on time here. What's it called? The song that I love?
Speaker 1Is it the one that I just released?
Speaker 2When did you release a new song? I don't know. A couple months ago.
Speaker 1I don't know. A couple months ago.
Speaker 2Uh, where is it? No, it's the one. Come on. I've sent this to you.
Speaker 1Screenshots. There's, I've put out a ton of them and my brain is also blank right now. Is it the way you move? Is it?
Speaker 2No, no, no. Whatever. I like your music. Thanks, man. Uh, what's your, what's your handle on Spotify?
Speaker 1It's, uh, wild coast is the name of the band. Wild coast. Wild coast.
Speaker 2And now. Oh my God. John, the multi-time author. Cause you've published before. I have. This is your latest book of poetry. It's not even out yet.
Speaker 1This is the advanced reader copy.
Speaker 2Yeah. Um, and I'm an advanced reader. You are. Yeah.
Speaker 1Cause I'm an advanced reader of your book. So I felt like it was.
Speaker 2Well, thank you. Um, and I read it. I've read parts of it. I know the whole thing, but it's, it's beautiful. Caterwall. Caterwall. Potato, potato.
Speaker 1I mean, you have to speak English when you read English. Did I say I'm an advanced reader? The first page spells it out.
Speaker 2How to say it. Yeah. I skipped that one. Caterwall. Caterwall. What is Caterwall? It's a book of poetry. Well, a lot of
Speaker 1it is kind of tied to my anxiety. So Caterwall, um, is just like the best way that I could describe that is like, if you're like in New York and you hear a bunch of cats fighting in the back in the, in, in an alley, that's a Caterwall. Caterwalling down the street, like cacophonous using that word again. So a lot of these pieces are written through processing the very loud brain that I have, which empowers a lot of my day job, but it also like kills me after when I have to have a conversation. I love it.
Speaker 2So it's basically what I hear every night when I go to bed in New York on the first floor of my building. Yeah. Um, you write some beautiful stuff here. You write this thing about like how to, how I read a poem. Yeah. And one of the paragraphs that sat with me was you wrote someone sat with a feeling long enough to chase it into language. They then wrote it down, crossed it out, cursed their troubled brain, wrote it again, shaped it and reshaped it until it was true. A person handed you a piece from the interior of their life, which is lovely. The whole thing is just lovely. Yeah.
Speaker 1That's beautiful. That is lovely.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's my favorite thing. Is that a poem right there? That's just you, right?
Speaker 1I mean, it's me writing. I write poetically. You can read my emails and be like, dude, enough similes.
Speaker 2Yeah. So, so what, pick one here.
Speaker 1Yeah. I'm going to read, I'm going to read holy hands cause this is my favorite one. Um, there are only 10 holy hands
Speaker 2or holding hands. Holy. Is this where we're supposed to hold hands as you read it? Our hands are holy.
Speaker 1Yeah. That's okay. All right. Um, and this, this ties pretty well into everything that we've talked about, actually nothing about AI. It says, uh, this is called holy hands and I'm doing this on a fricking podcast. This is wild. Your hands don't belong in holy places. They belong on steering wheels at midnight. They belong on the back of a neck in a parking lot where the lights have been broken so long. The city forgot they were ever on. I was taught that holy meant set apart, consecrated, unreachable by the ordinary. But I have seen your hands peel an orange at 2 AM. Like it's the most patient thing a person can do all that care for something that was ever only going to disappear. Tell me that is not a kind of worship. Tell me the congregation has ever been that quiet. That's still that sure of what it was doing. Your hands don't belong behind stained glass. They belong in the actual world where the coffee goes cold and someone has to decide whether it's still worth drinking. The church taught me that holy was a place you entered into. I think holy is what happens when something ordinary refuses to apologize for how much it matters.
Speaker 2I think holy repeat that last line. That's awesome, man. Yeah. That's obviously a personal poem for you that goes back to your background, very religious. Yes. And you've deconstructed is the word. That's the word. Okay. Deconstructed. Tell us about that one.
Speaker 1Yeah. I think a lot of my life has been painted with this idea of holiness. I was raised evangelical Christian and I still hold a lot of very personal beliefs. But I definitely like stepped out of that world and I had to redefine these words. What does holiness mean? Like I still believe in beauty. I still believe in grace. I still believe in these things. And a lot of the last probably four years of my life has been redefining. I used to think that when I changed, I couldn't be what I was before. And I don't think that that's true anymore. I think very much a part of who I am is who I have always been. And how do we embrace that? That's this acceptance. That's this model of true understanding. And most of my writing has been through the lens of I need to understand myself. And I'm grateful that people like what I write and people buy my books and I get to go and speak and read in public and things like that. I really, really love that because there is this connective tissue that I really do connect back to like a really great meeting that we do at work when you see a human being for who they are. And there's no greater way that we can do that than just by opening up the interior of our life and welcoming people in. And I think that's what I want to do with my career. It's what I want to do with the customer success is built around human beings that actually like and understand creativeness. And that I get to walk into these meetings buttoned up with my tie and my slacks, but then also with my heart. And that's the core of it. And I think what I love the most about, just to tie it back to the people that pay both of us, is that that is ever present in every Pulse that we do and the dinners that we do. It is centered around the human beings.
Speaker 2So we're going to end this thing poetically in honor of Caterwall. Caterwall. Not Caterwall. Caterwha, whatever. Caterbuy it on Amazon. Yeah, Caterbuy it. Lightning round called John's favorite things. Oh gosh. Quick, first thing. Okay, yeah. Favorite CS podcast host.
Speaker 1Oh, Christy Faltruso. That was such an internal niche joke.
Speaker 2Favorite New Yorker.
Speaker 1Oh, Josh Schachter, hands down.
Speaker 2Favorite aspiring nonfiction author.
Speaker 1Oh, Josh Schachter.
Speaker 2Favorite Gainsight marketing leader.
Speaker 1Oh, Emily Singer.
Speaker 2We're going to keep going.
Speaker 1Josh Schachter. I think Josh Schachter. Nailed it. Nailed it.
Speaker 2John, your lightning round is over. Thank you so much for being here. My good buddy, John Johnson. I love you. Does all the things. All the things. You always impress me so much, man. Thank you for coming up to New York and thank you. Thank you for being on the program.
Speaker 1Of course. Thank you so much.
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