Why Most QBRs Fail And the 15-Minute QBR That Fixes Them

It's the first framework that I have really implemented that is a total game changer that executives do show up to the conversation, even if they're just curious, because they're like, none of my other vendors can do this in 15 minutes. How do you do it? It actually works. And it's all based on like my own experience declining QBRs with vendors as well as working on them with my team. This sounds like a story like the start of a future story where you will probably write a book. I'm reading this here to here. It's going to be a 15 minute read. Okay. I'll give you that. It's like it's going to be short. And this is the thing is like it's always harder to be concise than it is to be long-winded, right? So I promise you if it's a book, it'll be a 15 minute read. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of customer success talks, real challenges, experts, advice, deep podcasts, dedicated to helping those transition into customer success and early career customer success managers. I'm your host, Byron Toruño and just like you, I'm still learning about this amazing world of customer success, also a customer success manager, super curious to see where the work, our role is moving forward in the future and also learning from amazing individuals, amazing professionals, amazing people who sit here with us, invest their time, their energy, their insight to share with everyone here, including myself. Today is not the exception. And today we will be talking about a framework that has been viral recently. And it's a framework that is actually covering one of the most highly rituals that we have in CS, which is the QBR and there has been a lot of debates. Should that should we not do QBR? Should we actually change the name of it? Should we change the patterns of it? There's so much out there, but today is going to be a really interesting one that we touch on a different way of seeing QBRs. I will say even more more effective and impactful. And when I hang up a call with a customer, I always ask myself, how was that impactful? Was it worth my time? Was it worth the customers time? Were they multitasking or were they actually hyper focused on what I was saying? And that's part of the questions that we're going to be answering today. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Andrea Bomsdett is the founder and CEO of CS Impact, a consultancy providing fractional leadership and strategic advisory services to be to be SAS companies with 50 million to $150 million in AR. Known for turning customer success into a revenue engine, Andrea has helped grow stage companies generate millions and incremental revenue through outcomes driven retention and expansion. Strategies, so let me just repeat that part. I think super imparted outcome driven retention and expansion strategies and award winner thought leader in CS as well. Andrea is the creator of the 15 minutes QBR framework and that's what I was talking about 15 minutes QBR not one hour, 40 minutes, not even 30 minutes 15 minutes QBR. A framework that is really practical and is ready for is ready for us to use with our customers and align with them. Andrea, welcome to customer success talks. Thank you so much for having me Andrea. You are tackling one of those topics in CS. So I would love to know to know from you like what are we actually fundamentally getting wrong in the QBRs? So QBRs, I mean, we talk about them a lot in customers. Right. In fact, you know, might even say we're kind of tired of talking about them. And I think the reason why we're tired of talking about them is because they really don't work. Right. And so I know as a vice president of customer success, I declined every QBR that a vendor wanted to have with me. So on my team, right. Like we were using various solutions, right. With my customer success managers and those vendors would want to have a QBR with me. And I was always, always declined the QBR. And the reason why I declined it is because I felt that they were really low value. That these vendors truly didn't understand the problems that I was looking to solve and the time commitments and the stress that I was under. And so I always declined them. And yet was such a hypocrite because then I would turn to my team and I would say, how many QBRs are you running this quarter and you hit your goal? Right. And so I felt like it's such a hypocrite in that case. Because QBRs are a core measure of my team, a leading indicator of customer health, if you will. And yet I declined them all. It's interesting how you say low value. It's that everything is surrounding value, basically for for the stakeholders. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I always found them to be the biggest waste of time. And yet I always asked my team to do them. Is that is how do you start with this 15 minute QBR? How do everything started? So after after I finished my vice president of customer success roles in my last VP role, I actually was training some customer success team. So I was training on them on things like how to run commercial negotiations, how to have a consultative approach, etc. And in one of the Q&A sessions at the end of one of those trainings, a CSM put up their hand and they said, how do I get executives to attend my QBRs? And I sort of paused and I thought for a few minutes because this is a big problem, right? Like just like me declining QBRs executives decline them all the time or they commit to them and then they don't show up or they do show up and then they only stay for 15 minutes and then they're out. And I know my own teams were spending, you know, I can think of upwards of five hours to prepare for a QBR, right? Pulling metrics data and usage data and looking at support tickets and trying to verify like the value that the customer was getting, right? So spending all this time preparing for a meeting that then executives don't show up. Right? And that's what this CSM was asking me is like, how do I get people to show up? And so I sort of paused and I thought, you know, why don't you run the meeting in 15 minutes? She looked at me like I was crazy and she said, just hear me out. They said every executive has time for a 15 minute meeting. In fact, it's the easiest way to get time within an executive is just to tell them all I need is 15 minutes. I know as an executive myself, I could make time for a 15 minute meeting. But in that meeting, you want it to be very high value. And so I said, there's really only two questions that a customer ever wants to answer regarding a vendor's solution. And those two questions are this one is am I getting value from this solution? So that is always number one. Am I getting value from this solution? And two, should I keep spending money on it? And so I was like, so in those 15 minutes, you better answer those two questions, right? Am I getting value? And should I keep spending money on this? And so I said, in those 15 minutes, why don't you cover these three things? And I said, cover the value that they're getting. So the value to date, talk about how they can get more value. So with your experience working with other like customers, with their competitors, right? You are the expert. How can they get more value from your product or solution? And then make three recommendations. That's it. That's all, right? So then an executive leaves that meeting and they're like, I know the value I'm getting. I know how I can get more value. And I know three recommendations for how to move that forward. Right? And so that was actually the birth of the 15 minute QER, which I then on a whim decided to write a post about it on LinkedIn. I was like, okay, well, QERs are broken. We can do this in 15 minutes. Here's what you would cover. And then what I did was I just created a very simple framework. It was just a one page slide of like, hear the three things that you want to cover. And on that LinkedIn post, I said, if you'd like me to send you the framework, just comment 15 and the comments. I left it in that. And the next day, there was like a thousand people that had put 15 in the comments. And I was like, oh, wow, okay, so I started sending the framework. By the end of the week, there was over 5,000 people that had put 15 in the comments. And it what was surprising is it wasn't just CSM's that put 15 in the comments. And it wasn't just CS leaders that put 15 in the comments. It was CRO's CEO, CMOs and also executives in organizations that are not SaaS companies that are just like we need to talk with executives. We're having a really hard time getting an executive audience. I want to see the framework. And so it clearly like struck a nerve in the community, which is just that like executives don't have time for these meetings. They don't show up or if they do, sometimes they say they only have minutes, right? And yet it's one of the most high impact meetings that you can actually have with a customer. So you better not mess it up, right? And so, and so that's how the 15 minute QBR ended up going viral. In fact, I've spoken on I think at least five podcasts about the 15 minute QBR and continue to share the framework. In fact, I'm implementing the 15 minute QBR with one of my clients right now who has enterprise level Fortune 500 companies and executives that they are trying to get time with. And it's extremely difficult because they are one of a hundred vendors, right? Trying to get time with an executive. And so I've actually trained those teams on how to deliver a 15 minute QBR. What a good skill to have. Yeah. I mean, nice for your team that they were able to that you were that they were able to have you to train them on how with this big topic that we keep talking about in CS and it seems like you've had you found the fix of how to first bring the attention because it's like, what do we do before the meeting during the meeting and after the meeting? And then you already cover the before the meeting into currently attention when someone says 15 minutes, they might even enjoy just just to see just to be curious into how that's going to look like. In fact, they do. So it's it's a hook to get executives to show up and know the team will say I will deliver the the QBR in 15 minutes. And the executive is thinking I have never seen that ever, right? All of our other vendors because what typically happens in a QBR and I know this because I've sat in on so many and I've developed them for my teams, right? Is that the whole first 15 minutes is like, here's let's do introductions. And here's the who's who on the side and here's who we are on our side. Here's a little bit about the vision of us as a company and where we're going, right? And that's like the whole 15 minutes. But if you have an executive that is really strapped for time, they don't have time for that. Again, they just want to answer the question like, am I getting value from the solution? And should I keep spending money on it? Right? And so I was like, just scrap all that. Right? Let's get right to the value, which is actually really hard to do. It's it is easier to create a deck that's got an intro to the team that goes through like, you know, their usage stats, the vision of the company, how we're performing against their goals, right? Even I've seen QBRs that have dug into like support tickets, right? And then, okay, let's have an open discussion about your strategic priorities and capture some next steps. Like I've seen this. I've also seen the product roadmap thrown on the back half of the QBR, right? Words like, let me tell you about like the newest features coming in our product. And what that feels like to an executive because I've been on the other side, but on both sides, it feels like this QBR is all about you. It is all about the vendor. It's all about your chance or your opportunity to tell me about your company vision, your products, how we should be using your product. Like it's not about me. And I know as an executive, I was trying to solve very big problems at a strategic level. And so I didn't have time, right? For a vendor to tell me all about them selfishly, I was like, I just need to talk about my problems and how you are helping me solve my problems. And if your solution is not helping me, solve my problems, then I'm not interested, right? Yeah. I mean, it's also we're given so much information to a human being that can just capture X amount of information per day. Probably already had one QBR already before us or we are the first one and then the other one comes. So you have you remove all of the slides that you that you know that there was not generating value. But in 15 minutes, it was just hyper focused on the QBR or is there also time for discussion? Is there also time for questions like how is it dynamic during those 15 minutes looking like? Yeah. So what I recommended, how I train teams to run this, which works very well, is they basically, so let me back up a little bit because there are some really key sort of things that you need to have in place to run a QBR in 15 minutes. So one is you need a deep understanding of the problem that you're actually solving for your customer. And that comes through conversation. It comes from knowing their business, right? It comes from discovery. It comes from knowing the industry that they're in and the challenges that they're facing, right? And it comes from knowing who you're talking to, the persona within the organization and what matters to them. So all of that you need all of that to have a fundamental understanding of what value means to them because value is solving their problems. So one, you need to know who they are, what problems do they have, right? And then you need to connect the dots and you need to know how your product or service solves those problems, right? And then the only way in my experience to truly track all of that is to document it, right? And so I recommend documenting that in a success plan with the account. We have a good understanding of, okay, what is the problem we're looking to solve? Where do the objectives they're looking to achieve? Right? How would we measure that? Like, what are the key benefits if we hit those objectives? But more importantly, how will we know if we're successful? How will we measure it as much as you can quantify that value? And then the success plan is also your sort of blueprint of action in your account. So like, who's going to do what? By what dates? Right? So you want, you want to have those components of the success plan and be actively meeting with the customer before the QBR to make sure that you are actually solving their problems, that they are actually getting the value, that things are actually moving forward, right? So that's the foundation. And then there's another piece that I talked to a lot of organizations about because they really struggle with it is the data piece of like, okay, we know that our customers are using our products and services. We can see it. We can see the usage, right? But we don't truly understand what they're doing in here and how that translates to value. And we don't really know how to measure it in terms of the customer's business outcomes and the impact that we're making. Meaning we can see that they're in the product, they're using the product, they've activated these features, right? They've used this many licenses or this many tokens or whatever. But we don't truly know that our product has then helped them save this amount of money or help them generate this amount of money or help them get to this level of efficiency, right? And so that's the gap is a lot of companies, a lot of B2B SaaS companies, fundamentally know the usage statistics around their products. They can see that if they're tracking that, right? In the product, all that what we call telemetry, right? They can see that. But what I often hear is they have no idea how that actually translates to value. They have no idea how that actually solved a customer's problem, how that's actually saving their customers money or making their customers money. And that's why you need a success plan to have those conversations. It's not just about usage. In fact, I've seen phenomenal usage in customers that charm, right? Because that usage didn't translate into value. It's like moving from the being a product expert to being the strategic advisor for our customers in 15 minutes by collecting the information and working together with the customer. So this is the success plan. These are the next steps. This is the value that we have brought. And this is where we want to be with you together. Exactly. Yeah. And if I were to take that one step further, one thing I'm experimenting with right now is what's called a value map. So if the success plan is like the execution piece of like how are we working together? Who's doing what? How are you measuring it? The value map is like that executive facing piece, right? The truly answers the question of like what is the value you're getting from this product? How does that translate into business outcomes? Which all of that is really hard to do. It does involve that consultative approach of like this isn't just about usage. It's about a CSM fundamentally understanding a customer's business, right? The problems they're looking to solve what is meaningful to them and what produces meaningful results in that business. That's very different. In fact, this becomes more and more challenging to do as you move down market. I'd say at the enterprise level, this is a little bit, I don't say it's easier. It's not easier, but it's a little bit easier to get at to capture this information to run the discovery. As you move into mid-market and even SMB and long-tail customers, because I often get asked this question of like, "Okay, well, I can see how we can run a 15-minute KBR in an enterprise executive level with Fortune 500 companies." You're right about nine, yeah. But then how do you also run that down market? Because that would be great if we could also run a 15-minute KBR with 200 customers or 2000 customers or 20,000 customers, right? And I often get asked, "Well, how do you do that?" And in that case, my answer is you're not going to be able to talk to every customer to understand exactly the challenges of their business, exactly why they brought the product, exactly the outcomes that they're getting. However, what I love about success plans, what I love about KBRs, is that they're not infinite. And I'm saying there's a finite number of reasons or use cases why someone would buy your product. And there's a finite number of personas that are using your product. There's a finite number of industries that are using your product. So let me explain. So for instance, you may have a group of customers buying your product, right? This ICP that fits into accounting firms with 10 people who are looking to streamline their operations. Okay? So that's like one bucket. And then you might have another bucket, which is something different. And they're using your software in a slightly different way. And this is their persona and how they're using it, right? And then you might have another one. So what you want to do is truly understand each of those buckets then. So like, okay, let me take 2,000 customers and let me just kind of segment them into some buckets, right? This is the use case over here. And this is typically why they want to buy the product and what they're looking at itself. Here's another use case here. These, this group of customers are typically buying it for this reason. And this is the problem they're looking at. When you segment like that and you're like, okay, these are the personas that we're selling into. These are the problems that we're solving. Then you can infer a lot of the QBR, right? Again, this is not infinite. It's finite. So like, so based on your business, I know that you are likely trying to solve these challenges in these ways. And our product offers you a return on your investment in this way, right? And you probably have that about 90 to 95% correct. Okay? Especially if you know your customers, right? You do a bit of market research. Like, you've talked to enough of them. You can segment them, right? And then your QBR based on looking at their usage, you can say, okay, here's the value you're getting. Here's how you get more value and here's three recommendations based on my experience working with customers like you. Does this resonate? That's what you're doing. So you can absolutely do this at scale. But what it requires is understanding who you're selling to, right? Which solutions? What problems are you solving? What value you're getting, right? And if you're selling to different groups of customers, you just segment them, right? And your QBR, I'm going to tell you right now, is going to be 90 to 95% correct, right? And then you can automate that. You can do that digitally. You can say, based on what we see of your usage, right? In our platform, based on your interactions with us, here's the value you're getting. Here's how you get more value. Here are three recommendations. It does this land with you. You do want to do a bit of a check here of like, does this land with you? And you can also open it up to, would you like to have a conversation, right? Around this, but you can absolutely automate that. You can do that at scale. But you just really need to understand who your customers are and be able to clearly connect the dots between what they have purchased from you and the value that they are very likely getting. And you can do that because the features within your product would have been developed for a particular use case to solve a particular problem. Like you just need to connect those dots and you can absolutely automate this. You can send that 15 minute QBR as an email, right, with an option for a follow up meeting. You could even do some cool in app stuff with that, right? That like, oh, I see that you're using these features in this way. Here's three recommendations we have for how you can get more value. So this is, I know I went on a very long tangent there, but I get asked this question all the time of like 15 minute QBR. This sounds great. We could do this with our mid market enterprise customers. How do we do this with our digital customers? You can absolutely do this. It's definitely obvious that you have been asked many questions about the QBR framework. You went ahead into the questions I had. So it's time to finish the podcast. Yeah. I'm kidding. This is amazing. Sounds really impactful. And I was literally going to ask you about how to scale that to smaller group of customers. And you touch on the segmentation. And so you touch on the segmentation, which help us on the discovery side with the benchmark and then how to deliver that as well. So it doesn't necessarily mean that we need to have a meeting with the stakeholders in the same space and time. It could also be the lever via email, right? Exactly. Yeah, or even portions of it in app, right? What you're really doing is you're constantly answering those two questions I said earlier, which is, what is the value I'm getting from this product? Right? So you want to just keep coming back to your customers and saying, this is the value you're getting. And you're arming in them. Yes, you should absolutely keep spending money on this. You're getting a return on your investment. And it needs to be that clear, right? Because if I asked you, I don't know, what, and I'll just name some random CS tools, but like, what is the value that you're getting from Gainsight? What is the value that you're getting from to Tango or vitally? What is the value that you're getting from gone? What is the value that you're getting from Salesforce? You probably need to think about this for a second. Like, okay, I use this tool every day. What value am I actually getting, right? And so it's up to a vendor. If you want to secure your renewal, you don't leave it up to your customer to connect those dots, right? At renewal where they're like, oh, am I getting value from this? Is it actually saving me time? Like is it creating more efficiency? You want to just keep connecting those dots all the time. You are saving time. You are getting more efficiency. This is helping you make money. This is helping you do whatever those big outcomes, right? You're looking to achieve. Like I think of like, you know, customer success platforms and the tools that we use. It's like, okay, here's how you're getting more efficiency across your team, right? Here's how you're saving time. Here's how you are improving your retention rates with this product, right? Here's a direct link of like how we help you improve your retention. Here's how we help serve up expansion opportunities for you, right? Which helps your NRR. Those are the things that I care about, right? Where I'm like, okay, am I getting value from this? Meaning does it solve my biggest challenges, which as a CS leader are, I need to protect my customers. So I want GRR. I want to grow my customers. I want NRR. And I want greater efficiency across my team. Yeah. I'm thinking, I'm thinking as well. If I want to implement this, Andrea, and when you started implementing this yourself or your team, what were they doing wrong at the beginning? Because we need to sometimes, or we don't need to, but sometimes we learn from the mistakes. Where were those first mistakes that then you adjust here and there to make it really, really impactful? Yeah. So, well, there's a lot. There's a lot of things, right? But the biggest ones I've seen are those decks that open with like, here's an introduction to our team. And like, let's make sure everyone knows each other. And like, let's talk about our company vision. And like, I don't care about any of that stuff, right? Yeah. Because like, I mean, on this side of the table, like as a vendor, right, we get very caught up in ourselves, right, and thinking like, oh, our customers care about our vision as a company and where we're heading. Like, they don't really. They're like, are you integrating AI, right? Like, do you have AI in your platform? Yes or no? Right? So, the question that we're answering in the market right now, like, are you innovating? Yes. Or no, right? So, I've seen a lot of sort of mistakes, if you well, around how these KBRs are opened, right? We're just wasting the first few minutes rather than getting to the true value, right? In the solution. I am. And then I've also, I mean, when I said earlier, I've seen KBRs take five hours of prep time. In those instances where it took five hours of prep time, this was my own team, by the way. What we were doing for those five hours is we were trying to connect their usage that we could see in the platform, right? With the conversations that we'd had with them, with the reasons we thought they bought our solution, and we were trying to find value, right? We were trying to bring these three things together and say, you're getting a return on your investment. And the reason it took five hours is because we couldn't definitively do that. We couldn't actually say that, oh, this usage means that you're getting this value. We were trying to draw connections where we didn't know that they actually existed. And so that's why I recommend anchoring this in a success plan, right? Which comes ahead of the KBRs, who actually know what are the problems you're solving. You can actually measure them. You're keeping track and actually measuring it. Because then KBR gets really easy, where you're like, OK, here's exactly the value you've received because we have measured it with your team. There's no surprises. We did this together, right? That's really easy because you anchor that in your success plan of like, OK, here are the things that we have not covered off yet. We ran a pilot in this region, but we can roll out to all these other regions, right? We implemented with this one group, but we could implement with all these other groups. We launched this product or feature, but you have other products that are not implemented yet, right? So that value connection becomes really easy and then your recommendations become easy because you've had deep conversations with your customer and you're like, based on what I know about your business and your strategic priorities, here are the things that I recommend we do next. You can't do any of that if you have not had the conversation with your customer in advance. And if you haven't tracked it in some sort of a success plan or a value map, right? And so that's why QBRs take five hours is because you didn't have the conversation, right? You don't know enough about your customer's business. You don't know how they're measuring value in your solution and you're trying to connect dots that fundamentally you can't connect. And so, and you get into the QBR and you're trying to present something that's more fluff than factual, right? Like it's just-- >> Cosperous. >> It's miss. >> Exactly. And there are these principles apply for that first discovery call because it's about understanding the problem, understand who we're talking to. And I do want to also talk about the value map that you mentioned. But is this the same the first time that we meet with the customer ideally? All of that information is going to be in the CRM. So we will have some-- a lot of knowledge beforehand. But maybe not everyone has the luxury. So should we have like a different session, a bit longer to answer all of these questions? Or are they already-- like how have you deal with this part? >> Yeah. So the short answer is yes. You do want to be asking those discovery questions. You want a good understanding of why the customer bought your product in the first place, the problem they're looking to solve, how are you going to measure it? And it's all documented somewhere, ideally somewhere that it can be automated. So Salesforce, your CRM, or another tool, right? Where end as fields that you could actually pull from, right? So this is where things get interesting with AI, right? As long as you have captured this information, you can layer on an AI tool to basically say, summarize this for me, right? As long as you've asked the questions and captured the information, AI can spit out, right? You're sort of 15-minute QBR. That's not hard. You can also spit out like here are the problems that we're solving for this customer. Here's how we're going to measure it. You can spit out your success plan, right? So you can get great efficiency there. Again, as long as you've asked the questions and you've documented it, an AI tool just layers on top and can pull that information into whatever format. Now, let me back up. Let's say you're running a high-velocity business with a very short sale cycle, right? Meaning you're bringing in a lot of customers quickly with a very short sale cycle of under 30 days and there's not a lot of discovery, right, that has happened. And then the CSM gets them and it's high-velocity. So you just want to get them fast time to value. Maybe they're on board themselves, right? And so you haven't had a lot of actual conversations with them. That's okay. In those cases, it goes back to what I said about digital customers, where it's like, understand who you're selling to and what are their problems and problems, right? Common things that you are solving, right? You can collect data, right? Do survey. Know what were your top reasons for purchasing this product? You can look at like which features do they activate first in the product? You can connect all these dots without actually even having to have a conversation, right? If you truly understand your customer, you understand that persona, right? And then can layer on some data of how they're using the product. You don't need to necessarily have a conversation every time to be able to fully understand the likely problems you're solving, right? The likely pain points, how you are likely demonstrating ROI and create a QBR that's 95% correct. - This is amazing, Andrea. You created a framework that can be literally implemented even before talking to the customer, like to be at least ready with data to be proactive and then confirm that if that's the first conversation. So this is amazing how you were able to cover one of the biggest challenges that we have as customer success managers in the field. It's like how to bring the R-Stakeholders to the call, how to have them focus. And also, if there are some follow-up questions, they can always be answered after via email as well. If they need the roadmap, we can send them to them. So you have any AI prompt that is your favorite one to use right now when it comes to preparing for QBRs or doing QBRs or after? - So I do use AI, I use it every day. And I have experimented with a lot of different tools in terms of like, can it automatically like crawl different conversations, touch points, emails, et cetera, can it just create a success plan automatically? Can it create a QBR automatically? There's a couple of tools I'm actually exploring right now just to see how they can do that because I absolutely see a world in which this is possible, right? Again, as long as you have had the conversation and it's documented, you really just need an AI tool to layer over top of it and pull out the relevant information. Where I have had a challenge is depending on the AI tool that you use, you just have to be careful because of AI's bias towards answering your question and producing something that I have experimented with some AI tools that will infer how we are going to measure success with a customer, but it's not actually pulling what was agreed upon. And so that's the only challenge that I've run into is like, you need a more sophisticated AI tool that can basically tell the difference between something that was directly said, right? Versus what might have been implied in a conversation but never directly said. So let me give you an example. If I spit out a, or I gave you a 15 minute QBR that talked about how we had decreased tickets for your IT team by 15% and that was a measurable goal that we were working towards. Okay? So let's say it's like an IT or a software or whatever solution and I said, okay, we have decreased your support tickets into your IT team by 15%. And then you came back to me and you said, we never set 15% as a benchmark. Like that's great. I'm glad that we did that, but it's not meaningful to you because we never actually said that that's what we were trying to do that like 15% would be good, right? - That's about the situation to be in. - Right? So it's not, it's still good. It's still like, oh, 15%. But because it was never actually said and agreed upon or documented, it doesn't carry quite the same value rate, right? Because maybe I actually wanted to decrease them by 50%, right? And so I think this is where I've had to be careful with AI tools is like telling them like, I don't want you to infer what good looks like or infer how we're going to measure this or infer a metric that metric needs to be explicitly said and agreed upon with the customer. With the exception of those digital customers, right? Where you're looking for patterns across cohorts where you're like typically 15% reduction here is good. Does that make sense? - Completely, yeah. I have a platform, a system in AI system right now where I work at, that is AI and it connects with my documentation with my my email and my Slack, which is amazing, but it also means that it has a lot of information that has to go through, and it tends to have that issue that you're referring to. So that filter in part, it's such important to not trust AI with our eyes closed, basically. - Yeah, this is where I worry, right? Because customers are real people and these are real businesses. And so I think any AI tool that you are using, you need to be careful that it is actually pulling out real insights so that if you go back to that customer and you're like, okay, here's a success plan, here's what we agreed upon. What you don't want them to say is, we never agreed on that, right? And they will know. So I think AI tools are great, but this is where you need to be careful because they are real customers and the real businesses, like the accuracy, even like I'll go so far as to say like I've seen call summaries. I don't know how much you've leveraged AI for call summaries, right? But like, if I took a call summary today as fact, and did all the things that the call summary said that I was gonna do, I'm probably 90 to 95% correct, right? But there's that 5% that's probably incorrect, right? That if I actually executed and did, the customer would be like, we never talked about that, or that wasn't exactly what we agreed upon. - Yeah, that's bad. - You have to be careful, right? Because at the end of the day, these are relationships. - That's the part of AI that sometimes is like, it's a, there are two parts to this, is it making us efficient and is it making us effective? So that's a part, like. - Yeah, I mean, again, like grain of salt, right? And all these tools are relatively new. They're still a work in progress. And they don't replace a human, right? I know I experimented with using AI to analyze CSM calls for one of my clients. So after listening to about 100 CSM calls, like literally like listening to them, on two times speed, but listening to a whole call, after listening to about 100, I got the bright idea or brilliant idea to create like a custom chat GPT that would analyze the calls for me, right? And spit out the coaching that I wanted it to coach on. And, right, so I tried this out and it was somewhat correct. I'll give it that, but it was not fully correct. And one of the biggest things that the AI couldn't pick up on in the conversation is what was not said, right? And how the customer showed up. How they said something. - The sentiment. - The sentiment, right? It could have picked up on that. And so it would give coaching in certain areas that I was like, no, that's not actually really a big deal or like that is okay, given the sentiment of the call, right, what wasn't said, like I wouldn't give coaching like that. And so I definitely found it, you know, AI can get you, there's lots of efficiencies with AI. However, it's not the thing that you want to put all your eggs in that one basket, meaning like it's just, it's not 100%. So let me give you, I'm going to tell you a story. If that's okay. I'm going to go off the cuff. I would tell you a totally different story as an example. So, so this is a personal story. So I wanted to cross the border a few months ago, right, to see one of my clients. And I got held up at the border. Now, I have crossed the border. So I'm in Canada, I've crossed from Canada to the US multiple times, okay, maybe more than multiple, like lots and lots of times, right, as an employee of different companies, personal travel, whatever. So I'm crossing the border, but this is the first time that I'm crossing the border as a consultant owning my own business, okay. Very first time. So I get held up at the border, right, because they want a work visa. And I didn't have a work visa, okay. Which was brand new to me. I posted a link to this. But this was like the very first time and it was just less and learned, didn't know that this was a thing. And so I decided to go back home, not cross the border. I worked virtually with the client. Oh, really fine, right. So, so then I wanted to cross the border again, okay. And I was like, again, this time I wanted to go to sales kickoff from my client. And I was like, I think I can go to this because I'm a participant. Like I'm an observer of this. I'm not being paid on US soil. I don't think I need a work visa, right. I was like, okay, going as a participant, I'm observing only. And so I hopped into like chat GPT and I was like, here's the circumstances. I want to cross the border. I got held up last time. Can I cross the border? Do I need a work visa and chat? Sounds like something that a lot of people have done in the past too. Right. And chat GPT was like, no, you don't need a work visa. Like you're not being, you know, you're you're you're observing only at the sales kickoff. Like you should be good. Blah blah blah. And then I hop over because I'm like, well, let me do a bit of due diligence. I'm not going to just take chat GPT's word for this, right. So so I hope you know, US immigration websites, right. And look up like the criteria for like a B1 visa versus a TN1 visa, right. And I do my due diligence and I'm like, I still don't think that I need a work visa. I think that I'll just get like a letter from the company, right. And have all my documentation. And I think I'll be able to cross the border. Kate. And then I was like, you know, I should actually be sure. Like I'm 99% sure right now, but I'd like to be 100% sure. The way that you're telling this under eyes, making me like anxiety to hear the end of this sounds like. Well, so I was like, I want to be 100% sure because if I show up at the border and they decline me again, right. Then that would probably be bad. I probably have a really hard time getting into the US again. And so so I got an immigration lawyer. Okay. Now is like, wow. Right. I was like, right. Like I was like, here's here's a circumstances. Here's my business. Here's what I'm looking to do. I want to go to the SKO. Okay. And according to chat, she BT, I was like, I'm 99% sure. I did my research on like US immigration, right. So I'm like 99% sure, but I'm going to pay you to tell me if I'm actually right or not. Okay. Yeah. You know what he said? My experience says that he said the opposite of chat GPT. Yes, he said you cannot cross the border. Okay, that's a good feeling to hear that before crossing the border. That's true. Right. So that is a very like a very personal story, but a long way of saying that like, you can do your due diligence on chat GPT and you can leverage AI and you know, you can do all the right things. But at the end of the day, I needed a human who was an expert in immigration law to tell me that like, no, you can't actually cross the border under these circumstances. And here's why. And that's and what I realized after that is that I failed to give chat GPT a very important piece of information that probably would have changed how it responded. But because I didn't know to give it that very important piece of information, it was like, yeah, you can cross the border. And the immigration lawyer took him all of one minute to tell me, no, you actually can't because you're still being paid while you're at the SKO by a US company. So even if you're not on stage, you're technically working. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's not not a better way of letting us know that we do have to pay attention and actually read, not be lazy, like actually read and think. That the question is always about is it AI or is it the is it us who what we how we ask stuff, you know, but like we know that AI is improving every day. Three years for years ago, we were just literally talking about AI, how it was going to take customer success and it actually has helped me personally many things. But sometimes it actually takes me a bit more that if I actually take decision by my own. So it's like that about of love and hate is still going on in my end. Andrea, it's time to start wrapping up today's episode. Super happy, super grateful and I have learned a lot of stuff from you into how to be more, how to actually call the attention of the stakeholders and how to even implement. You literally gave us the recipe of how to implement and what to look for. So the last question I have for you actually have to. One is what are we missing? Is there anything that you feel that we're missing that we should touch regarding the 15 minutes QBR framework for people transitioning into. CS or early career customer success managers? - Oh, I feel like we pretty much covered it. And I did more talking than I intended to, but I'm just so passionate about this topic. I mean, I have been in customer success a long time before that I was in sales, before that I was in marketing. And I've seen these KBRs go just crazy. - Very godly, but just they have not been good, right? They have not been efficient. They've been a big waste of time both for the companies and the teams that are running them and for the companies and teams that attend them, right? And so I know that there's, you know, we love to pick the KBR and talk about it on LinkedIn and talk about how it's broken and whatever, but this framework actually works. It's the first framework that I have really implemented that is a total game changer that executives do show up to the conversation, even if they're just curious 'cause they're like, "None of my other vendors can do this in 15 minutes. How do you do it?" It actually works. And it's all based on my own experience, you know, declining KBRs with vendors as well as working on them with my team. - This sounds like a story, like the start of a future story where you will probably write a book. - I'm reading this year to here. - It's going to be a 15 minute read, okay? - I'll be using that. - Like it's going to be short. And this is the thing is like, it's always harder to be concise than it is to be long-winded, right? - Yeah, working people find the 15 minutes KBR framework, working day, working we learn more about it and working we know more about what is going to happen for you and your career in the future. What, where can we find all of those news? - Sure, yeah, so there's two places to find me. Actually, there's three, but there's, so one, you can follow me on LinkedIn. So I post pretty much every day, all from my own experience in customer success. I have, I think, over 12,000 followers now and growing. So I try and post things that are very relevant to speak to CS operators, people in the position. And it's things that I've either learned in my own career or I'm learning now with my clients, I'm always learning, so I'm always posting. The other place you can find me is on Substack. So I have a real talk with CS Impact on Substack. The framework is also posted there and I'm committed to posting weekly. Right now I'm working on a How To series. So I cover things like How To Forecast, How To Grow in your career, when your company or role feels stagnant. I've covered, oh my gosh, what else did I cover? I mean, a number of topics on, I mean, how to scale, how to turn customer success into a revenue engine. But the last one I posted just last week was a sarcastic cheeky sort of post about how to get yourself fired. Yes, leaders, so. - How things will that be? - Yeah. Maybe easier than you think. But so that's all on my Substack. If you like Instagram, you can also find me on Instagram, customer success impact. So those are the three places to find me. - Perfect. So everyone in the description of today's episode, you will find all the links to find Andrea, to find the QR, the 15 minutes QR framework and what is common in her career that is so excited to hear everything that you can do in 24 hours and sleep. So it's super interesting to hear that. What it stays for me today is the word value and also to answer two questions as a customer, am I getting the value from the product and also should I keep spending more money? And then you also cover the steps to actually do that in a QR. So Andrea, I don't have, I just have one more thing to give you and I wish you all the best for whatever project is gonna come in your career. - Thank you, thank you for having me today. - And everyone, remember, keep learning, keep growing and let's keep improving the world of customer success until next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)