Taylor: [00:00:00] Welcome to Successful, where we break down the essential elements of leading customer success strategies. This podcast is all about uncovering blind spots, pushing beyond typical best practices, and tackling those out-of-bound topics for CS leaders that are key to our success. So if you're a CS professional seeking to innovate and adapt in an ever-changing landscape, join us on this journey to be more successful.

I'm your host, Taylor Johnston, VP of Customer Success at Vitally. Today, we have a true expert in the field joining us, Ryan Seams, the Head of Customer Success at AssemblyAI. We're delving into a crucial aspect of success in the world of CS, the power of storytelling. Getting a seat in those elusive C-suite conversations is a challenge we all face. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just getting started. So let's dive into Ryan's methods for ensuring you have a seat at the table.

Well, Ryan, [00:01:00] congratulations on your new role at AssemblyAI. To catch our listeners up, you were at your previous company for 10 years. So how are you settling in?

Ryan: Yeah, so first, thank you. It's, it's been pretty crazy. Going from a later-stage startup where you have established processes, established teams, and lots of resources, right, to an earlier-stage growth startup, there's just a big difference. And ultimately, it's what I was asking for. It's the challenge that I was looking for in terms of being able to be a little bit more involved on the front lines, and active with the customers. And really from a company perspective, going back to where I started at Mixpanel, which is defining a category and doing that alongside, you know, your customers.

And I think that's one of the things that I found so exciting when I started at Mixpanel is We were really defining the category for behavioral event-based product analytics. Basically, what are my users doing and why? So you can understand, why do they adopt the product? Why do they retain in the product? Etc. [00:02:00] And that was just such a fun time to be educating the market, building alongside customers, understanding what their use cases were, what they wanted to see in the product. And funneling that back into the team to go build, right, what ultimately became the Mixpanel that we see today. And I think, you know, moving over to Assembly, it's like starting that journey all over again. And so, yeah, it's been a fun experience so far, just getting started, but yeah, really enjoying it.

Taylor: That's incredible. It's awesome to see you so passionate about it. I can tell you really going to be driving some incredible results for the team as well as for your customers. So let's talk a little bit about moving into a new role as a CS leader. You know, snagging a spot in those C-suite conversations as you're coming in the door is key, but we all know it can be a challenge. Not just for new leaders, but also for seasoned leaders as well. So Ryan, what's, what's your method for ensuring that you have a seat at the table in those conversations?

Ryan: Yeah, I think one thing first and foremost that's really important as a CS leader to keep in [00:03:00] mind is just understanding the broader context of the business is really important to give yourself the ability to get into those conversations and have a productive voice at the table.

And what I mean by that is, you really need to understand how the business operates from a metrics perspective. And be able to understand that because ultimately every decision that you make is going to have some sort of trade-off one way or the other.

And if you don't understand the broader business context, and specifically what I mean is, what metrics matter to the business, what are the goals that you're focused on, how those translate to different teams, and the headcount that you have on those teams, and the projects that they're running, and the processes that they're using, right? You're going to have a really tough time being able to contextualize the trade-offs that ultimately need to be made in the business. And I think the most classic trade-off is like, well, I'm a CS leader. We need more CSMs because we're not able to support our customers. Well, you could certainly, you know, hire a CSM, but that also has different trade-offs to the business, right?

Maybe that means [00:04:00] that your CSMs are assigned to, you know, the margin of your business. And so actually the, the cost of servicing your customers is going to go up from that. Maybe you're assigned to sales and marketing if you're more on the renewals and expansion side, and that's going to increase your sales and marketing budget, right? Which ultimately means sales efficiency is going to go down. And so whoever you put in the seat is going to have to drive revenue to have ROI to the business. And so I think it's really important that you understand. Those metrics and how to have those conversations because ultimately everything's a trade-off.

And so that'll help you be productive when you are in the room. And I think beyond the piece of, hey, how do I get in the room and have a productive conversation? I think what's really important, especially in this day and age where automation is becoming more and more popular, AI is able to summarize a lot of stuff for us, is the role of CS in the past, in my mind, in many ways, was to collect all this different customer feedback across our Zoom calls and our Slack chats and our emails and our in-person meetings, etc. [00:05:00] And, you know, take that and relay it to the organization in some way to tell them what is the voice of the customer.

And that might be something like logging a product feedback gap or posting a message in a channel to say, Hey, I had this great onsite, and here are these things that I learned. And I think all that's well and good and it's not going to go away, but the more that you can bring literally the voice and the story of the customer to the rest of the organization and push that to them automatically, the more transparent your team is going to be about the work that they're doing, the more informed the rest of your organization is going to be, and ultimately, the better you're going to be able to build products, service, sell to your customers, et cetera.

And so I think with that, an example of how you might go about doing this right is If you are recording your calls, for example, there's really interesting information included in those calls around what we talked about, what was discussed, the summary, etc. Post that information to the rest of your org.

Put that in one place where everyone can just go and consume, like, a live feed of, like, [00:06:00] what are our customers really saying? The other side of that, right, is What is your opinion and what's your story about what's happening with those customers? And so with anything, right? Yes, there's the like, hey, what's the ROI? What are the actual metrics and impact behind this? But I think it's crucially important to have your CS team tell the story of what did they with that customer, why it worked, why did it not, and share that with the rest of the organization. And I think it serves really two purposes. One is your whole team will benefit from really understanding how this other CSM on my team approaches a similar account.

How should we be servicing our online accounts versus our on-contract customer accounts based on this feedback, it also gives you your story and your brand to the rest of the organization so that everyone can see what is the CS team doing and how is it driving an impact to our customers at the end of the day.

Taylor: I love that. What I heard you say there is it's not enough just to have the data. You know, I think there's a lot of focus [00:07:00] right now on gathering the data and getting all the data points. That is important. And. You have to interpret it, give a perspective on it, and tell the story behind it. So, you know, a question that I hear all the time is what is the value of customer success? And you've touched on it here, but talk to me about how you tell the story of the value of CS internally.

Ryan: Yeah, I think ultimately there's both the qualitative and the quantitative side of this and You do have to approach it from both angles, and I think the quantitative side, right, you know, depending on your CS team, you may be in a different part of your P& L and how you're accounted for in terms of your team's budget and finances. But ultimately, right, the goal should be to demonstrate how attaching a customer success person and the work that they're doing on an account translates to better business outcomes for my particular company. And typically, right, if you're in customer success, that's like, hey, if we assign a [00:08:00] CSM versus if we don't, what does net retention look like?

What's the growth of our customers? What's the logo retention look like, right? Are we more likely to keep them as one of our customers? And you can actually use that to show the impact, like, hey, before and after we had a CSM, what do those metrics look like? Similarly, right, even if you potentially have CSMs on all of your accounts, right? You'd be able to do things like, hey, if we perform certain activities, right? Or if we actually went and did certain types of events, or if we went to an on-site, right? What's the impact of that actual action, right? On some of those core business metrics. And so, I do think it's really important to find a way to take whatever you're doing every day, whatever you're doing with customers, and translate that to the higher level business metrics that count, right, as ROI and growth for the company. I think the qualitative side of that, right, is You can make that report and you can make the best story of all time and show this PowerPoint presentation.

But if everyone else in the room is like, I don't even know who the CS team is or what they do or how they help [00:09:00] customers or what they've been up to for the past month. You can have the greatest report of all time that says every CSM is doing all this great work. And when we're attached, our net retention is plus 20%. But if they're not visible and transparent and sharing and telling those stories, It's going to be hard to substantiate the value of the CST still.

And so, I think it's equally important that your CST tells their story. You put that out in the open. You give access to the rest of the organization on all those insights and trends and interesting things that you're seeing happening with the market.

Because if you're just, you know, a CSM who's thinking of those yourself and putting it in your notes and nothing else happens from that point forward, You're actually causing yourself problems later down the line because you're not telling that story and sharing that information. So I think for CS teams, maybe compared to sales, they're a little bit more bashful sometimes, and they're not going to be the ones who want to be like, I did this crazy thing to close this deal. And, you know, I would encourage you to think maybe a little bit differently about that. The goal [00:10:00] is not to be here to sit and brag and say, here's what I did and show off. It should, your goal should be, How do I get this knowledge to the rest of my organization so that everyone can do a better job at understanding and helping our customers? 

That'll help your product team build a better product, your sales team understand better use cases and why customers buy, and your marketing team understands what's that ideal customer and how we work with them, right? You need to be able to tell that story and give that information to the rest of your organization. Otherwise, It'll be really hard down the line to be like, well, what does this team do? If you're not if you're not doing those things.

Taylor: And I think it's so easy sometimes to think to your point, you could walk in with that beautiful PowerPoint. You're like, I'm ready for this quarterly planning session or whatever it may be. But yeah, if you're not laying the breadcrumbs and the path the whole way along. That story may not, may or may not resonate, may or may not land. So that's a great callout. Do you have an example of a time when you told a [00:11:00] story and it had, you know, a great payoff?

Ryan: Yeah, so obviously new at AssemblyAI. So I'd probably not pick an example from there quite yet. We're in the process of doing some of this and building some of the infrastructure for creating the feedback loops that I'm talking about. But at least if we zoom out and go maybe the other way towards that, when I was at Mixpanel in particular, something that we did is Every time a CS person had an engagement with a customer, we defined what that engagement was.

So, for instance, onboarding, that's an engagement. For instance, coming in and doing a health check on a customer, that's an engagement. For a renewal conversation, talking about your adoption and usage and where we could provide more value, would be an engagement, right? So, we defined each of these things as an engagement. And what we had, excuse me, each of the customer success folks on our team do is At the end of each engagement, they would actually write out what was the story of what we did with that customer during that time period. What were the things that we actually helped them achieve? What were the [00:12:00] roadblocks or problems that maybe got in our way and how did we solve them?

And that story became basically just a live feed of like, what are we actually doing with customers? And not on a 12-month renewal horizon, where it's really hard to talk about everything that happened in 12 months and how we got there. But literally, how do we get them from point A to point B during this engagement?

Because they're brand new and we onboarded them and we got them to the point where they got started. Or they weren't using the tool, we did a help check, we assessed different places we could help, and we got them to actually use it again. And those little, like, micro-stories along the way, right? That's the true value of customer success. And if you're not really saying what was the process and story that went into that, you're going to be missing out on those key pieces of information. And so by creating this setup where each of those engagements became its own story and basically creating a ritual around the team where we told those stories.

We celebrated the best ones in all hands via a nomination of what we [00:13:00] called a golden nugget emoji. So if you hit a specific emoji, you'd nominate your teammate for like the next award at the monthly all hands. Those would be all stories we could share right in other channels or with our executives or the product team. And it really just became this way that We were just learning and growing and getting better every day as a team. At the same time, right, we were creating this great repository of information about who our customers were, what they were trying to achieve, and how we were able to go do that.

Taylor: That's incredible. On the flip side of it, I've heard you say, if you aren't out there telling the narrative, someone else is going to fill in the gaps for you. So has there been a time when you realize you weren't telling the story clearly enough?

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, one of the most basic things with this is, it's really funny, but like, what channels are you communicating in, and are they private or public to the rest of the organization? And a good example, right, is, I think a lot of people are often shy away from maybe asking the [00:14:00] dumb question. They don't want to be in a public channel and ask something where they feel like they might be stupid. You know, oh, judged or whatever it happens to be. So then you create a private channel, and then all of your questions start to go to this private channel where everyone's talking about this cool stuff and these workarounds and what they're doing, but it's all private to you and your team, right?

If you have that type of setup today, you've like intentionally put yourself in a bad place because everything that's in that private channel, none of the other teams see it, none of your executives see it, none of your cross-functional partners see it. It is as if you are crickets to them, they don't even know you're in there doing all that work. And so one simple piece of advice, set the public channels that you're going to communicate in and what you're going to put into that channel so that you can have that place where everyone's collaborating. And then I think, you know, on on top of that, right, a lot of it has to go has to do with like, what are those rituals around telling the story, and each organization is going to be different.

But I would say most organizations when you walk in and assemblies like this as well, right? [00:15:00] Everyone's going to be celebrating like the contract being signed, the wins, where the revenue, right, is recognized. And I think you could try to latch on to that or, or tell your story with that. But the reality is like, that's kind of the story about why the revenue closed. You need to tell the story about why a customer's business outcome was achieved and how we did that and find a way to go and do that. And if you're not doing that in some system, that systemic way that resonates with the rest of your organization, then. Go figure out what is the way my organization likes to communicate, how they like to receive this and go design that.

And, you know, in my case, that might be a Slack channel with the feed of all the customer calls. For your organization, that might be a weekly or monthly report where you summarize everything in a PowerPoint deck and send it out to your executives and your cross-functional partners, right? But the means, the means is the same end, which is, How are we showing that voice to the customer and what we're doing to help them and making sure that everyone's aware of what's going on?[00:16:00]

Taylor: Yeah. So on that, talking about cross-functional partners and really tailoring the message and the how-to to those different stakeholders. How do you think about telling a story maybe differently to an executive team versus a product team versus your sales team?

Ryan: Yeah, I think it's really, this goes kind of a little bit back to the business metrics, but it's really important to understand From the other side, who you're talking to, what are their incentives? What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve, right? With the information that you're providing them. And when you think about it that way, right? You'll ultimately think a little bit differently about how I want to approach giving that information to that person. When you're talking to a product person, you're talking to someone who's trying to think, what should we be building for the future?

How are we going to solve customers problems, not just now, but six months from now, and two years from now, and five years from now, right? And what does that look like? And so, when you're, you know, going and actually providing them information and collaborating with them, I think it's really important not [00:17:00] just to say, here's the stuff that's broken and the things that are wrong today, but also, here are the trends of what we're seeing with our customers and the cool things that they're thinking about and what they're trying to do in the future.

So you can capture kind of both sides of that equation, and that will resonate more with the product person than just here's what's wrong today, or here are these really exciting long-term things, but we don't know anything about what they're using today and what they want to see, right? Like, you need both, and a similar story goes, you know, maybe with the sales side, right? Like, ultimately, they're going to be incentivized by closing revenue. So, if you're thinking, hey, how am I going to talk to them about who our ICP is, and by ICP I mean ideal customer profile, like what are the right people to target, what's the right messaging, how should we go about working with them, right?

You need to tie that back to revenue. So, as an example of this, you could say something like, hey, actually, when we go and use this messaging versus that messaging, our conversion rate is 2x. Then they'll be like, Oh my gosh, they're listening right away. They'll be completely listening. But if you, instead you were [00:18:00] just like, Hey, we should use this messaging versus that messaging, our customers like it more and it's better for our company. They're like, okay, whatever. I mean, sounds interesting, but I don't know. Why would I change? Right? And so you have to tell that story. It's like, Hey, doing this versus that, you're going to get this big result. And you have salespeople's attention very quickly when you have those types of metrics and stats where you can tell them, Hey, if you do it this way versus that way, you're actually going to see a big impact on the bottom line.

Taylor: I think that's a great question to always be asking yourselves. Why should I change? If you're creating a presentation or trying to roll something out and you haven't thought about it in the other person's shoes, why should I change? You may even need to readdress how you're, how you're presenting it. So that's, that's incredible. That's awesome. You mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, team culture. And so outside of the leadership and cross-functional partner piece of it, how do you build in storytelling as a part of your team culture?

Ryan: This is a great question. And, you know, you have to start from somewhere. And so, whatever you can get your hands on when you [00:19:00] get in the door, and I'm experiencing, you know, this first hand with AssemblyAI is like, whatever you can do, beg, borrow, and steal. Figure out what are the stories people are telling, where are they, what are they saying, and, you know, just collect them. Start somewhere. Make a big, long Google Doc, even, if you have to, of just like, here are all the things that I've heard, let me sort through this. But I think over time, right, you want to build into your team that muscle, that, If you do something to help a customer, but you don't go and say anything or teach anyone else or share that with anyone else, you're actually just not doing your job, candidly.

And this is something that, for example, during my time at Mixpanel, that we actually saw firsthand, which is You know, people were doing great work. They were going above and beyond. I mean, they were doing crazy stuff, you know, workarounds that take 10 plus hours and all this custom configuration, et cetera. And it was like, where do you hear about it? Like, well, I heard about it in a meeting when I was doing a one-on-one with one of my managers. And you're like, this is not an effective way to share information, right? And build that team culture. And so, you know, I [00:20:00] think one way to do it is to reinforce the best behavior that you want to see.

So for the people who are great, who are doing the things that you want to see, make them the shining stars, give them the golden nugget, give them the award of the month. You go ahead and write a message to everybody else that's like, hey, this person did this great thing. Look at them, right? So you got to reinforce that, that positive behavior. I think equally right in the long run, it's important to set that as an expectation of the team as well. And something, for example, that we did at Mixpano, we were a remote company. What does that mean? Well, we communicate a lot in Slack and chat, ultimately. And if you're not active in communicating in Slack and chat, same thing as before, no one sees you.

It's going to be really hard for us to understand if you're actually, like, involved and working and contributing and all of that stuff. You know, one way is to reinforce the best, have people follow, et cetera. But I also think in the long run, it's an expectation of the different roles, right? And as an example for our more senior folks on the CS team, we actually made it an expectation that they would be [00:21:00] in Slack, actively helping and mentoring other people on the team, sending help for questions that they had, and also publishing like, Hey, here's our new best practice for X, like you all should go and try it. And I think for that in particular, right, it's, it's building that team culture through the rituals, through identifying who's the best. In the long run, also, you know, incorporating that into things like your performance reviews, candidly.

Taylor: That's awesome. All right. For anyone who has been listening and out there, but has put this maybe on the back burner or is really not sure where to start, what is step one, Ryan?

Ryan: Step one is to get started. I think everyone will say something, you know, go do this, go do that. Honestly, it's like, get started. Your first version is going to be bad. Your second one's going to be also bad. Your third one will probably be also bad, but If you keep waiting and you don't do V1 or V2 or V3, and it's been two weeks and you're like, I don't know what to do. Just do something. Like I said, create a Google Doc, dump a bunch of links in or [00:22:00] thoughts that people have about the stories of customers, sort them out, and then look at the date, look at what's there and say, Hey, what are the good things in this? What do I need to really pull out and start figuring out how do I elevate those stories and the good things that are in there, in that data set within my organization, whether that's through the monthly report, the Slack message, an email to all the key stakeholders, whatever it is?

But just get started and equally, right, figure out within your organization, how do people communicate and what are the norms and start, start sending something in that, that way, in that channel, that format. And you can just iterate on that and get better over time. And I think when you're, when you're first jumping in, you're maybe a little scared, like, is this right? Is this wrong? I don't know. Maybe this isn't just doing the place that people want and they'll be happy. They'll be happy to read it and get feedback and whatever. If you've missed the place. And, you know, you spend three months before you do it, it's going to be really rough. So just get started. Try something and listen to feedback. I mean, everything that comes back from there is a little piece [00:23:00] of feedback that you can make the next one better.

Taylor: Such great advice. All right. You all heard it here. No better time than today. Just get started. Awesome, Ryan. Well, before we let you go, we're going to have some fun with some quick hit questions. Get to know the human side of you a little bit more. You ready to rock and roll?

Ryan: Let's do it. All right.

Taylor: What do you wish you could spend more time on in life or in work?

Ryan: It's such an interesting question. I think for me personally, I would like to spend more time outside. Actually, I think my recent, my recent summarization. And so I've been trying to take, especially before daylight savings, right? A little walk during the day, enjoy the sunshine, because I think it has such an impact on your mood, your ability to communicate, and your excitement for the day. And so. For me, I think it's like, in life, spending some more time outside. From the work perspective, in particular, I always wish I had more time to sit down and build. I started as a [00:24:00] support engineer. I was a solutions architect earlier in my career. I really like tinkering and coding and playing around with stuff. And, uh, you know, there's the right balance when you're the leader of like building yourself versus delegating to your team and having them go help and build it. And so I always try to find a little bit of time for that because I am passionate about it and I really enjoy it day to day.

Taylor: What's one habit or routine you follow that's had a positive impact on your life?

Ryan: Probably five years ago, I did my first triathlon, and it was kind of a challenge and on a whim with a friend. And I ended up really enjoying it. And it's actually had a huge impact on my life overall, where I've been doing more and more and more of them. I'm constantly training for them, but I think what's really, really positive about it is, yeah, there's the physical exercise side, great. But for me, what's really useful is the fact that, like, you set this goal that's so far off, and you have this really hard thing that you're going to do. And the amount of, like, perseverance and the daily grind and just keeping focused throughout that whole period to get to [00:25:00] that endpoint, I think has really changed my perspective on a lot of just the day-to-day of work even, right?

What is that endpoint you're trying to get to? Great. Not every day, not every interaction is going to be great, but are you getting better? Are you improving? Are you working towards that goal? And I think I've, yeah, I picked that up on the side as a personal thing. And I think it's actually just helped really with, with my mindset and the professional space as well.

Taylor: That's incredible. Do you have one coming up?

Ryan: I do. I have three this year. So yeah. Next one is in San Francisco. It's called Escape from Alcatraz. You jump, jump from a boat by the rock and you swim to shore and go from there. Have you done it before? Or is this the first time? I have. Yeah. I've done it three times.

Taylor: Alright, last one. What makes you feel successful?

Ryan: I think it's funny, you know, earlier in my career when I was working with customers directly, there was like the satisfaction of like shipping the workaround and this cool use case and this exciting thing and you're like, you get to see them excited. As I've [00:26:00] transitioned to leadership, right, you get less of those moments where you're the one on the call doing that, right? You get to see your team do that. I think those are the moments where, like, at least still for me, they resonate a lot where my team is able to go and do that with a customer. And so as an example, you know, it's obviously you're watching a recording, but you get to see the reaction from a customer like, Oh my God, that is so cool.

You just like, you're totally doing something that no one else is doing. And I'm so excited. Like, that's the type of thing where you're like, Wow, I get excited. And you're like, so you're so excited for your team too, right? And so those are the cases where you really want to celebrate them and pull those interesting nuggets out. For me, right, that's like the moment of excitement, but the, like, how you feel successful with that, right, is like, your team is a great place to work, everybody likes to come and be a part of the culture, it's an exciting place, it's somewhere where people want to be, and I take a lot of, like, pride and success in that.

Obviously, you have to drive results to be able to do that too, but the success, I think, is more in the people and their experience and their feeling and the [00:27:00] culture that you've built more so than, you know, the very specific, you know, metrics, maybe.

Taylor: That's incredible. I can see you even getting excited as you're talking about it. So I know it makes you feel successful. Well, Ryan, so much. so much. What a fantastic conversation. Heard so much about thinking about storytelling, tailoring it to your audience, when to use data, when to use qualitative, and how to build it into your team culture. I mean, a million insights that I know I'm taken away from today.

Ryan: Thank you so much. Thank you. It's great to be here.

Taylor: A big thanks to Ryan for sharing his insights with us today. And a special thanks to all of you who tuned in. If you enjoyed this episode and found value in our conversation, don't forget to spread the word to your customer success friends. And before you go, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Find me on LinkedIn at Taylor Johnston, and leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Your feedback means the world to us. See you next time.