Ep#70: Empowering Business Growth through Retention, Sales, and Relationship-Building ft. Jordan Silverman (Chief Customer Officer, VeraCore)

Jordan Silverman 0:02 As long as you're looking at health scoring and usage data, and QBRs input data, as long as those are trending in the right direction, you should feel really confident in your decision. Taylor Kenerson 0:14 Welcome to the hyper engaged podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here. We uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We an earth, the house wise, and what's that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am here with Adil and our beautiful guest, Jordan. Jordan, thank you so, so much for joining us today. Jordan Silverman 0:42 My pleasure. Thank you guys for having me. Taylor Kenerson 0:44 So let's start with how did you get into customer facing these customer facing roles and tell us a little bit about where you are now and what you're doing. Jordan Silverman 0:53 I am currently the CCO Chief Customer Officer at Vera core. But I took a circuitous irregular route to get here and I wouldn't change it at all. So grew up in New York, went to University of Michigan. While I was at University of Michigan, I had no idea what I wanted to do what I wanted to study, I knew nothing. All I knew is like all my friends are going to the business school. I hated it. I did not want to do that. And I'm just like, Guys, this isn't for me. My freshman year, my friend and I took a philosophy class. And it was like philosophy one on one, like intro level, took the class. We walked out of the class, my friend and I, I turned to him and I said, that was awesome. I think I might want to be a philosophy major. And he turned to me and said, I'm dropping this class. This sucks. But for me, it just like totally opened my eyes changed how I think. And I had no idea what I wanted to do with the philosophy major. I knew I liked the classes. So I was like, Alright, I'm a philosophy major. What about law school? So my junior senior year sat down, went to library had an LSAT book. And I'm like, I don't want to do LSAT. Like this is like my friends are all outside having fun. Like I want to go hang out with them. I knew I didn't want to do LSAT. So my senior year in college, I started a company, it was called Star toilet paper with my brother. And we did advertising and public bathrooms. So think printed paper towels, printed toilet paper ads, and dispensers, all of that stuff. Taylor Kenerson 2:28 What an idea. Jordan, what did I Jordan Silverman 2:31 literally was just sitting in the bathroom thought of it. I always read. That's how it came like nothing more than that. My brother and I ran that business. We hired a couple people raised a small seed round, I ran the business for five, six years, basically a couple of years in college couple years post college did not work, right. We ran into a ton of manufacturing issues, a ton of scale issues. But I learned a ton. While I was there, I was the CEO, I was handling everything. So after that I had no idea what I wanted to do next. All I knew is I love talking to people and I loved interacting with clients. So I said, Let's do sales. That was my first thought, Let's do sales. So I joined at that point, my first Sass company. And I've read a book called Predictable Revenue. And it was like mind blowing to me just like changed my entire thought process and like wait, like people will just pay you month after month. And you just do a little bit of servicing a little bit of success and they just pay you and I just loved it. So at that company is called mentioned I was there for two years, I joined as an AE early on. And I grew into the VP of sales. So I basically built the sales team out inbound outbound partnerships, all that stuff. I got into sales to build relationships with people. But I realized pretty quickly at least in like SMB and mid market sales, you're not actually building relationships with people. That's like customer successes. So at this point, probably seven, eight years ago, I then pivoted and I joined market man where I was for seven years as the VP of Customer Success. So when I joined it was seven people total, I was the second or third CS hire, and I was tasked with building out the CS team. And we just grew and scaled when I left. A couple months ago, we were 30 people on the CSI and I was overseeing onboarding, training, support CSMs all that fun stuff. And I just recently joined AmeriCorps where I'm gonna be a similar role but Chief Customer Officer which is awesome. Basically doing what I love of rolling up my sleeves but building at the same time. Taylor Kenerson 4:41 I love that you have a really amazing you have a really interesting background of course you know that but you have a lot of a lot of these different journeys are able to shape you know, the decisions you're able to make now and kind of your frameworks and your thought models into how you build. So I'm really interested to see because you have a different background. When you feel I just wanted to mark it, man, what did you as the VP of CES? What did you think about like, what did you do first? What do you have to do first in order to build this? Yes, and especially because now you're seeing it from like the sales angle. And you seeing it from a CEO angle, because now you're, you know, you're seeing these different functions, because you had your hands rolled up in that. So can you just dive a little bit into that? Jordan Silverman 5:21 I was lucky when I joined market man to have an amazing team already there and a super supportive CEO. So I was really lucky to have those two things in place. The first thing I did in this event really silly is I actually told the team to stop using the CRM system. So at that point, they're using Zoho CRM and like, it's like, Stop, like, we have no idea what our customer journey looks like, just stop, like, let's take a pause. And what we actually did is, in our office, we turned a wall into a customer journey. So we had an onboarding, first value and the desired outcome. At that point, we're not closing that any new clients, so every new client, we just posted, and we just watched them move throughout the journey. And that was just like fundamental and changing the understanding of what it looked like. And it also helped us understand what is the customer journey today? And what should it be? Because those are very different MOS companies. Taylor Kenerson 6:18 Sometimes it's about going back to like the fundamentals. Sometimes when you first join a company, or you go into a new role, you're always thinking, you know, so grand, and so big, like, oh, I have to move to what is expected of but where did you start? Where are you now? What does that look like? And then how are you going to go from A to Z, and you have to obviously take these little steps in order to you know, attack that that same? Jordan Silverman 6:42 It's also really interesting, because when I first joined Merck, when I was director of customer success, I was a CSM though, right? Like, let's like we, I was called the directors, yes, but I was the CSM. And there's three of us. But we were onboarding, we were training, we were CES, we were a customer service, we were all of those things. So I think one of the really interesting things as a company scales is, everyone has a generalist to start. And then everyone has to start specializing. And I think that's also a fun part of the journey. How fast that happens depends on how quickly the company grows. But not being afraid to do that is one of the things that I learned. When I was at market man. And I had a new hire my CEO is very good about like, Hey, we've got budget for three new people based on the pipeline, you decide who you want to hire. And at first, I was like three more CSMs every time. But eventually, like, no stop, just hired new CSMs like maybe an onboarding person, maybe a trainer, maybe you invest instead of a person into a tool, right? And you start to realize and understand that like, yes, a CSM is the easiest solution, but it's not always the most scalable. Taylor Kenerson 7:48 Absolutely. And it goes to that concept, doing more with less, I mean, using more people is better. But sometimes it's way better to work with a small a team, because the points of contact even when you go beyond four or five people it like it exponentially increases and how much how many lines of communication there are. And there's immense problems in that sometimes. Jordan Silverman 8:11 And just to put tell, I like totally egregious, but numbers like when I first joined market, man, we've said that 100 customers was the max that the CSM can handle, could not handle more. And by the time I left, you are implementing things to enable a CSM to handle 1000 customers, just through better tooling and improved processes. Adil Saleh 8:30 Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's where that's where, you know, the self serve model come into play. That's where the digital ces come into play, you gotta make sure you're pretty much hybrid, you are keeping those low hanging fruits like, you know, low paying customers pretty much centered and you know, having them grow over time. So, you know, at the market, man, I'm curious on how did you set up systems around increasing the lifetime value of the customer like evolving and expanding them over time? What kind of technology was incorporated, you introduced? And what kind of, you know, I would say data analytics, you kept into the system to make sure to indicate their journey, and then you know, helping them elevate and unlock growth. Jordan Silverman 9:19 So first thing to say is that market man and bear core, I think the best way to increase LTV is actually to attack retention before expansion. So that is my focus. First off is like if I if I have one thing, and I have to retain a customer or expand them, I'm always going towards retention. Recognize that we need to expand elsewhere. We need to make up that revenue gap. Right. But I think the best way to increase LTV is retention, both Mr. Coleman and very core at market man we were using to Tango is our main tool. So to Tango was something that was instrumental in helping us scale and very core it's a combination of Salesforce and Power BI But we'll be adding more CS specific tooling here as well. Adil Saleh 10:06 Great, love that and when it comes to, you know, assigning accounts like book of business to CSM your team at CSM, how big is your team at record? This? Is this point eight or Jordan Silverman 10:18 10 people now Adil Saleh 10:20 10 people together? How many in success? Success? Yeah, Jordan Silverman 10:24 we've got three people in proactive success. Adil Saleh 10:28 Okay, that's interesting. So yep, three people. So how you smartly assigned those books books to these individuals? And how do you see that different skill set was required? Because you're also serving enterprise some of the, you know, big businesses, Legacy businesses, so you got to make sure you're not, you know, you having people that are technical that can onboard them, as well. So how different was the case with people? Jordan Silverman 10:56 What are the similarities between Mark Cuban and Barrackpore is they are both easy to use systems, but extremely complex and time consuming systems are set up. And I kind of liked that. Because it means that onboarding and training and implementation is everything. And if you can nail that, and you can get people to first value quickly and easily. They're going to be customers for a long time, because it can be really sticky and hard to rip out. And I think that's a really good thing. So for us, the first thing I want to attack is, is our onboarding process, correct? are we implementing how customers want to get implemented? Now a lot of that is holding customers accountable to timelines, right? And making sure they are putting in, Taylor Kenerson 11:43 I was just gonna say, how do you even make that happen? Jordan Silverman 11:46 So every single customer, at their core, we are having a kickoff conversation with and I'm marking man, we have some more tech touch, but a very core every single customer's into a little bit more mid market, we're having a kickoff conversation with an on that kickoff, it's all about level setting expectations. We are willing to put in as much time and effort as you are, what are the milestones and dates you want to hit, because we're just telling you, we're going to hold you accountable to this. Now, it doesn't always work, right? Like, I've been here for a month and a half. And we already have customers, we already have new customers costing us. So it's there's no perfect way to do it. But it's just about as much as you can level setting expectations with customers and saying that, like your success is my success. We are sharing this effort together, you are not alone in making sure they know that. Taylor Kenerson 12:40 I love that. Can you uncover some more strategies that you use during this onboarding process. I mean, holding your clients accountable is one in which is a huge one, too, that I don't want to overlook. Because often as you serving a customer, you always put the finger at yourself where it's a dance, it needs to work together, you know, it's a it's a 5050, you know, we're here for you, of course, like at your beck and call kind of thing. But you also need to do what you sign up to do. And that's where like, there's such a gap sometimes. So can you walk through some of the strategies and tactics that you implement, maybe at their core, but you've also implemented at market man and have seen work and grow? Jordan Silverman 13:21 So first thing to say is it's really funny, because like, when I was doing star and mentioned it was on the sales side, like I did door to door, I did cold calling and like, sometimes I feel like I'm doing that with clients that have already paid us and signed up. It's like guys, like you've signed this contract. You're the ones that came to us. Why do I feel like I'm the one cold calling and pitching you? Like come on. So first off, like, just know that if that's happening to you, like you're not alone, that's not this like unique thing that's happening, that's ubiquitous, that's happening everywhere. Having said that, you need to keep them accountable. So what we do right now, and this is actually something that the onboarding team was doing here, before I even joined and I love it is every single Friday, they're sending an email to inflight customers with a hey, here are the milestone dates that you told us. Are they green, yellow, or red and holding them accountable. That's the first thing. The second thing and this is something that I'm really pushing for and this comes from my sales days is keep them on the calendar. Don't end the meeting without another meeting scheduled. They're gonna try to push you off. Just put a placeholder, just put a reminder there for them. Because you need to keep their attention. Now, that does not work at scale, right? That does not work at Tech touch. It's great for mid market. It's great for enterprise, but I fully recognize that SMB and tech touch, you need to automate those things. Adil Saleh 14:52 That's where the growth comes. That's how you can look after all of them have a 360 view of you know, just talking on CSM like he can have a 360 view of all the customers that you can he knows what are his high value tasks that he needs to stay on top of, or daily, weekly, monthly basis. So talking about record, I know that, you know, order management fulfillment is such a huge problem for retail businesses, businesses that are localized in different states, and then, you know, some of the International multinational businesses. So I see that a product stickiness platform stickiness, you know, post onboarding. So, you know, I'm sure you don't have to tell them too much, because they're pretty much on their own post onboarding. So how does the post onboarding journey looks like, like, how do you guys make sure like leaders get like, churn like, How much is it and you guys get ghosting, as you said, post onboarding, because they are absolutely integrated. So now they have to make sure they're using JIRA Core for the order management, you know, all sorts of, you know, fulfillment needs. So how does the post board onboarding? Jordan Silverman 16:00 So we work with three pls third party logistics, warehouses, fulfillment centers, all different kinds of companies. The onboarding team's responsibility is to get their first account up and running. They've got multiple accounts that are fulfilling for the onboarding training team's responsibility is to get the first account up and running. CSMs responsibility then is to say, alright, they've got 1020 150 200 accounts, right? How do I as the CSM, proactively helped them get the rest of their accounts set up. So we want to teach them how to do things, not do things for them, I think that's such a fine line. What we're trying to do more and more is, when you're on a training with a customer, it can become robotic, right, you're doing the same training over and over again. And if you're the one sharing screens, the customer is not going to pay attention. So what we really want to do is have the customer be the one sharing the screen as much as possible, right? Like we have all sat in on demos on busy days. And we've got two screens, and we're looking exactly at the other screen and barely paying attention. But when you're the one clicking, you really can't do that. So I think it starts with onboarding and making sure that we teach them and not just do it for them. And then the CSM responsibility says, All right, they've got 200 accounts, how do we get the rest of those set up with them? Not for them, but with them? How do we help make sure that they have that we also are really lucky that we've got an incredible knowledge base and team behind building that knowledge base, which is really helpful. So like me, I've been here six weeks, I've been learning a tremendous amount myself about the product from the knowledge base. And like, it's, it's great. So I think having that combination of strong support strong knowledge base is also really is a really important backup for the CSM. Adil Saleh 17:57 Absolutely, absolutely. So we talked about customer education and law, like, you know, on one side, you're investing as a business, you're investing onto the training and management for your team, you know, have you know, having internal documents, making sure they get get to know everything from day one, having all of these journeys of customers pretty much laid out. And then on the customer side, you have sort of an open source knowledge base, like a lot of these platforms, they're also helping build that that gives the customer education. So what kind of technologies have we incorporated? In terms of, you know, this customer education part? That is also part like comes under umbrella of customer centricity that we talk so much about? Soy? And how does your how does that information translate into into different industries? Like you're not just talking about, you know, retail, you're you're talking about manufacturing, you're talking about a lot of other industries that are connected? So how does does that information? centralizes strategizes? And how does it differ for different industries? Jordan Silverman 19:00 I think there's such a first video, I love that question. Because I think there's such a big difference between help articles and a knowledge base, a help articles there to troubleshoot, Hey, I see this error, what can I do, but a knowledge base is there to teach them how to get outcomes. And at the end of the day, that's all customers care about, like, they don't want to they don't want to click buttons like we just have a standing up market man of like, people do not get into hospitality to sit in front of a computer. They get into hospitality interact with people not to sit in front of a computer. So we need to teach them not only how to use the software, but how to spend less time. One of the things I really liked about both Mark Newman and very core is they work in industries with really small margins, really small margins and restaurants, small margins and 1.5% Adil Saleh 19:53 of the payments. Jordan Silverman 19:57 And there's so many software's out there and both industries to help them increase top line revenue. But that top line revenue is pennies, 10s of cents and bottom line profit. But what we're trying to do is help them decrease their cost of goods health and decrease their costs, which is pure profit. So I think our responsibility is to not only show them how to use the software, but how to become better business operators. And I think with a really good, it takes time, with a really good knowledge base. You can have videos, you can have trainings, you can have webinars about how to do those kinds of things. Taylor Kenerson 20:35 I love that you brought up this key aspect about the outcomes, you know, you first agree upon what is needed, and then it's how do you exceed those expectations beyond what what they even imagined? So how do you enable your CS team to be that proactive person for your client and really go back to your original point, like expand the client, expand the existing client? Jordan Silverman 21:00 I think you'd start right away with the salesperson getting goals from their customer from the lead from the opportunity. Now, again, we need to reset expectations on the kickoff call because salesperson, the client, just not always the same page. Right? We all have been there. We all know that. I've been lucky. We're at Markman and very Carson, amazing sales teams that do an awesome job with that. But the first thing is understanding why why is the client here? Why are they spending the time? Why are they spending the money. And once you understand what their goal is, then you just tell them my my job is to get you there. That might be more products that might be less products, like we have had customers that we've said, Hey, you should downgrade we have much more than we say you should upgrade. But we've absolutely told me like use products differently, because that's what's best for you. So it's about understanding what their goal is, and consistently telling them like I am here to drive outcomes. I'm not here for support. I'm not here to answer tickets. I'm here to drive outcomes and like, consistently reminding them of that. Taylor Kenerson 22:07 How do you how do you bridge this gap now between your sales and your CS team? Do you have specific strategies or tactics that you implement to try to eliminate some of those gaps in those air holes where you do see like a sales person over promising and then you're stuck here as a CSC and like, oh shit, like, what are we gonna do here? Jordan Silverman 22:27 It's gonna happen. It's inevitable, right? Like, it's a numbers game. So at market man, we were primarily an SMB business. So we were literally closing new customers every single day. Now, we're not closing enterprise customers every single day, we were literally closing SMBs some mid markets every single day, we had really good velocity. And with that, at some point, just a numbers game. If you've got 100 new clients, there's gonna be a couple where there's just bad expectations. And there's nothing, nothing about the salesperson, a lot of times prospects are going to hear what they want to hear. So first thing that we did is and we have the same idea of Eric, or is commission payouts aren't done until they 91. And they also a deal is not marked as closed until a kickoff happens. So the sales team's responsibility to schedule the kickoff the sales team's response, not not during the transition. Exactly. And that made such a big impact for us in making sure that we knew once we talk to the client, it would happen but like we were talking earlier about ghosting, like we had people ghost us between signing the deal. And having a kickoff call, like not even post kickoff call ghosting, like ghosting, like they literally just give us their credit card and stopped answering. So it's about holding people accountable for what their milestone and deliverable is. And to me if the salesperson is responsible for kicking off and hand new off the client and after that, they're good to go and keep on prospecting and keep on hunting. But they got to at least make that intro. Adil Saleh 24:07 Yes, absolutely. That's where to go like you cannot scale it without it. You got to make sure everybody on one side customers you kind of other than the one side account executive that's that's making the transition and thinking oh, that's my job is done. It's not done there. You got to make sure you schedule the kickoff call for the onboarding manager. And and that's when your job is done. Great. So two aspects on the last before we set you free one on the on the team side how you doing growing the team. Second on the expansion side, like of course you are CCO might be too early to say you know as this but you know just want to see your opinion we can explore together like how you guys are going to expand in the coming years into the industry. I'm sure it's been there for quite some years for more than two decades now. And you are covering cases around billing and account management, round fulfillment, order fulfillment, order management, all of that across, mainly what I see is monly, mainly the retail industry, to how you guys are trying to expand and penetrate into more industries. Because these similar cases are maybe the oil and gas, maybe energy sector that has many of these cases, they're still using legacy software's and they're having like, people at $150,000 annual salary taking care of that. One thing, like, even in the health care, you know, I'm sure there are HIPAA compliance, and you know, all these federal laws and things. But this is a very big problem, we are working in the healthcare, we know that these you know, these front desk, you know, reps, they are being consumed a lot into all of this, you know, booking management, order management, cost management, you know, all of this, you know, in the medical billing sector, you know, the insurances, and these doctors always banging their head, not getting their claim, you know, clear by the insurance says, And they they don't know whether they need to build patient or, you know, there's range of different industries, how you guys are expanding on one side, when it comes to more developing more business, on the other side, how you're thinking of expanding the team, what kind of new roles you've had open, and what kind of skill set will be required is there loads of listeners that are from the CS, emerging CS roles in there, they want new, better opportunities. Jordan Silverman 26:26 My job as a leader, I think this is the job of every leader is just to remove obstacles from our team, in our team's job is to remove obstacles for our clients, like I just think it goes down and then it goes back up, right? It's bi directional. So before I can remove obstacles for my team, you need to understand what the customer journey looks like. I'm a huge proponent of good documentation. So right now, at very core, we are in the process of just like, let's over document, like, let's write down step by step, what happens of like, alright, sales closes a deal. What happens? And like, what does sales closing a deal to first year of renewal? Right? Like, let's just focus on first 12 months, like, what does that look like? And I think once you have really good documentation around that, that's going to tell you where you need to hire and what you need. Because realistically, it will tell you where the obstacles are, where the hurdles are, what's stopping you from growing and scaling. So right now, that's the stage we're at. That might be a trainer, that might be a CSM, that might be more customer service, that might be more tech touch people. But I think right now, we are in the documentation stage of where are our obstacles? And where do we need to hire people around Taylor Kenerson 27:44 you document in a specific way, or using a specific tool I can tell you're just like, super organized. So is there a specific Is it is it going back to the wall, just some posts. Jordan Silverman 27:55 Right now we're just using like a huge Word doc and excel just to get like raw thoughts on paper, like that's it, because I'm not worried about visualization or anything like that. Eventually, what I want to do so at Mark men, what we did is we use Lucid Chart to visualize everything. And then we actually externalized a lot of it also. So we use Zendesk at market man. And we would actually build things in Lucid Chart internally, and then externalize pieces of it. Because I think it's really important for a client to be able to get on the kickoff call. And for us to be able to say, hey, here's here's what your training looks like, step by step, week by week, day by day. So right now, we're just gonna like black, like raw words on paper, like if you're trying to Adil Saleh 28:38 navigate to the friction points, and then you'll decide, okay, this is these, these are the gaps, and it sets how we can smartly move from here to fill these, maybe we need more resources, but we need more, you know, technology incorporated, a lot of things that come that can can come to that good exercise. Jordan Silverman 28:57 Exactly. And I think one of the really interesting things is like, if you've got $100,000 budget, you can use that budget however you want, that might be a person that might be a junior person and a tool that might be a really expensive tool, like so I'm a big proponent of like, before you say like go hire, get a tool, like just understand what your actual goal is. And then you can go for it and you can decide together what's best. I love that. Adil Saleh 29:26 And also on the growth of like, on the business operations as well as, you know, business development side, how you guys are trying to explore more of these industries, expanding more, because you guys are doing pretty great, but there's still a huge gap. And there's a lot of these, I would say industries as a whole I didn't guess energy sector, healthcare, you know, medical billing entirely a different industry. You know, that's a big pain. So how you guys are trying to penetrate those. Jordan Silverman 29:59 One of the things We did that market man. And I wanted to do that. And I want to do it here as well, very core is at market man, we had an incredible partner network point of sale systems, accounting systems scheduling software's. I want to copy that over here at Vera core, because what we really what we realized at market man is, your partners will tell you where to go next. And if you've got good partners and good integrations and a strong connection, your partners will guide you and lead the way. And then you just double down on that with products for them. So what we did a very quick last couple weeks is we basically define like, what is our ICP? What's our ideal customer? And that will tell you today, who you should be spending marketing dollars on what partners you should go after. So right now, what we want to do is figure out all right, let's actually look at the software stacks of our ideal customers, go partner with those companies, and then work with those companies as partners to see which industries which verticals, who should we go after next. Oh, Adil Saleh 31:06 that's, that's a smart move, like you're keeping this very, very basic. Simply by you're going after a lot of these you can get from your existing install base as well, like all of these customers you have in the retail, a lot of customers that you have in the hospitality in the industry, you can get a lot of those partners and the software technologies that they use, rather than will be some legacy software's, you know, they'll be using for years and years. Yeah, great. Great. So are the CCO now, thinking ahead of in terms of net dollar retention and net revenue retention? What What kind of growth metrics are you looking for, like in terms of, you know, choosing a Northstar of 30%, or 30% 80%? I don't 20% higher than 30%. That's ideal. So how do you see your installed base growing up? In the coming years, maybe two years from now? Jordan Silverman 32:00 You are absolutely correct that NRR is like what we care most about. Right? We are really focused on right now the retention side of NRR. Because I mean, we have customers that have been with us for decades, like we literally have government's been with us for decades. So we know that once we onboard and train a customer, they'll stick with us. So NRR is our major focus. In my opinion, once you're over that 100% hurdle, then you can really go go go. So right now we're at the stage of how do we make sure that we are consistently quarter after quarter above 100%? Because at market man have aircore? We've had quarters above we've had quarters, not above, right, but how do you consistently have quarters, quarter after quarter month after month of predictably being over 100%? Because then you can just add fuel and just go, but you need to get those basic foundations in place to get the metrics there consistently. And then you can really start to scale that. Taylor Kenerson 33:13 Have you seen any similarities on when you do achieve that? 100 or above? And then when you drop below, are there some things that always go on? We're like, crap, we did it again, like, here we are. Jordan Silverman 33:26 So yes, is the answer. I think, first off, when you're at a startup company, you can't lose a logo. But it's that simple. Like, if you lose a logo, you're not above 100%. That simple. When you're at a startup company, like you've got X amount of logos, and when you lose a logo, like it's gonna mess up the month, it's gonna mess up the corner. So things like that's the first thing Tyler It's just like, keep every single logo no matter what, I'm a big proponent. This is a little bit old school, but like, Zoom is amazing. But you got to go see your logos, like get on a plane, go see your logos, like I will be going to visit all of our logos this year, to make sure that they say like, Hey, I'm Jordan. Like just it's just go take them out for dinner, have drinks, go have fun, like, they don't actually want to talk business with you. They just want to see you're a real person and hang out with you. So I think the first thing is like can't lose your logos. Go see them. When you are trying to scale and we saw this at market man, as you try new things, things might not get better right away. So when we went from, hey, let's have every single customer have a CSM to tech touch. We made mistakes, and we saw tchard increase in the short term. Now, we were looking at input metrics, right? So like I think the problem with NRR is it's an output metric. It's not actually an indicator of how the business is doing. So my opinion is as long as you're looking at health scoring and usage data and QBRs input data As long as those are trending in the right direction, you should feel really confident in your decision, but can't lose logos and just know like, you're going to run into issues as you scale and try new things. That is okay. As long as the indicators are showing green. Taylor Kenerson 35:14 I'm really glad you brought up that point of relationships. And sometimes, obviously, CES, you know, it's, it's thrown around often, you know, build relationships with your customers. But what's really key is, the relationship has to go beyond the product, the service that you're offering, and beyond the business, and once you actually see that, like the human you just may be sold to is an actual person and not just like a robot there for for eight hours today. And they actually like to have fun and stuff like that. That's where you get that deep relationship and not just like, oh, I have 1000 people that I talked to you, it's like, Are you are you good enough with them, or you could just call them up, and they could tell you their challenges. And you could solve it right there. And then, and I think that's a really critical point that a lot of people miss is relationships need to go deep. And you need to see the human beyond just the title that they hold over a call. And that's really Adil Saleh 36:06 Yeah, and sometimes you got to you got to see your customers, as hearts, not brains, not wallets that are making transactions, you got to make sure that you got to sit with them on a human level, deep down on a human level, just like you said, you're gonna visit all of them this year. Good luck with that, you're gonna have a lot of fun. Jordan Silverman 36:25 I think I think over my seven years, my market man team got sick of me saying like, success is 50% of it happiness, the other 50%. And you need your customers to be successful at achieving outcomes, but also happy working with you. Like they need to get on the Zoom and not dread talking to you. And the same goes for CSMs. Like, if a CSM is dreading talking to a client, and they're not happy. It's gonna be a tough relationship overall. So it goes both ways. Adil Saleh 36:54 Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so Jordan, it was realized talking to you, I mean, I cannot say it enough, the energy, you've got so much to offer, trust me, and I. So appreciate it, what we're doing next. Thank you, what we're doing next is we're going to have sort of a Slack community where we are trying to pair look like technologies like yours, we've got loads, other, you know, helping in the same space, not directly competing you but you know, they're pretty much fishing in the water. We are trying to connect, pair them with startups because we have loads of startups from YC TechStars. Chem is coming soon to this month. So we're trying to get all of these startups in sort of one slack with these people like yourself, like senior leadership, from Gong from, you know, all these successful SAS businesses for the last 10 years, that they've done incredibly well. So these startups get to share information, get to learn anything that digging beneath, you know, angel investment that, you know, advisory from some of the CCOs they need, maybe, you know, contractors, anything that they need, you know, hearing aids is emerging to be one of the biggest support hub for post sales operations, more for the startups, because we've seen, you know, Customer Success ops, from a very big scale, you know, talking to going and talking to, you know, appsflyer says, our product or all of these, and now we are working hands on and trying to translate that information and connections and all of those partners, to the startups to help them grow from the ground up and learn from the mistake you cannot live alone, long enough to, you know, make them themselves. So you gotta learn from people mistakes. Jordan Silverman 38:37 I think about the things I did when I first started and like, it makes me so happy and so and laughed so hard and so sad at the same time. I'm just like, what were you thinking? So learning from mistakes is an unbelievable thing. And if you can, you can speed that up. That's only a good thing. Adil Saleh 38:54 Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Jordan, it's pretty much it for today. I really appreciate you taking the time from your schedule and you sharing your story, interesting stories, some, some very, very, you know, underleveraged facts about CES and more towards you know, onboarding, that is that is something that we can we can take take away from this episode. Appreciate your time. Jordan Silverman 39:18 Totally. My pleasure. Yeah. Thank you guys. This is great. Adil Saleh 39:20 Thank you so much, sir. Have a good rest Jordan Silverman 39:23 you to the FBI Taylor. So you guys. Adil Saleh 39:26 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. We will see you next time in another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a Customer Success leader and how you can empower engagements with some building some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners do reaches out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.