Ralph Meyer for Customer Success Festival | London

Speaker: Ralph Meyer, Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Procore

Ralph Meyer: Hello there, Customer Success Collective attendees! Looking forward to presenting to you guys at the end of November. My name is Ralph Meyer and I work for Procore Technologies. I am an Enterprise Customer Success Manager, working with some of their most complex clients and helping them adopt our tools and solutions.

Ralph Meyer: So I'll be speaking about using the customer journey to enhance the customer's experience and there are a few elements that go through to it. Everything from when I implement and making that really easy, of course. But what happens after we've done the implementation? The customer's been using our tool for a while and it's working, we're happy. What then? Where do we take that discussion from that point forward? And this is where I'm really interested in that shift into how do I take that conversation to other parts of their business. And quite often we need to identify many activities that surround not only our tool, but also other activities that further enhance that solution and offering. And the reason I mention this is is that from an experience perspective it helps me as a consumer, or somebody who has purchased the product, to not only uplift my skill set and my understanding of a specific topic or a solution, or enhancement of that solution. Not only uplift my knowledge in that point of view, but it starts to help solve problems in other parts of my business that I didn't necessarily think were there, through the identification of that synergies. So I'll be discussing about what those roadmaps potentially may look like. How do you build them up? How do you get buy in from the customer on those topics, of course. And then at the end of all of this, how do we have that value discussion? How do we take that conversation and say, "Great. So we've helped you either save money, make money, safe time, etc. but we've also offered you additional benefits through insight, the provision of specialties in certain areas, lifting your industry up or lifting your business up to an industry standard, or be the industry standard, be the thought leader in this space. Those types of elements and that experience, for me as a customer, makes me feel like I'm invincible and makes me feel that working with you makes me a better user, a better company as a consequence. So certainly, hopefully that's a really interesting topic for you. Look forward to having a conversation about that.

Ralph Meyer: So what are the nuggets of information I'd like you to walk away with? For me personally, if you walk away from my presentation, having a look at how you work with clients and are able to look at how do I take that conversation, not necessarily away from product, but enhance that discussion. So, as a CSM, not only will you start to generate new skills in terms of learning how to work outside of those comfort zones, but also you'll be able to elevate that conversation to more senior stakeholders within a business, especially when you start looking at things like road maps. I think if you could leave my talk with a point of inspiration to think, "I can do that; that doesn't look that hard; It's not that bad; It's something I want to try", that for me would be a success just because it's a great place to be in working with some of those elements and certainly your business will feel the benefit from it as clients become more sticky, buy more stuff from you trying new part of your solution as a consequence of that type of engagement. But I would say that's certainly one of the nuggets I'd like to pass on, if I may.

Ralph Meyer: What I'd like you to leave my presentation with is, maybe, feeling a little inspired in your own circumstances about how you can apply some of the ideas that I'm going to talk about. It is not something where we're going to focus specifically only on our own tools and products and say, "Hey, this is what we do." This is taking the conversation a little bit outside of most CSM comfort zone and tackling issues that quite often you have to say, "I'm not sure if this is part of my skill set", and if that is indeed the case, then I've succeeded because quite often as a CSM we fall into things that isn't part of our natural job description and seeking some of these out and having those discussions will not only set you apart from other toolsets, other companies, competitors, etc., but also help you to up level those conversations. So, I certainly hope you get that sense of inspiration from my presentation. I think the other element to this, it's quite a daunting topic. Quite often we look at some of these issues and it can be overwhelming in terms of its complexity, in terms of the nature of how it works. And so what I'd like to reassure you or certainly give you a few points of confidence in is that it's not that bad. We can make it easier. And I'm gonna talk you through some of the methodology that I went through to simplify some of those elements and then of course I made it really complicated just for good measure, so my boss thought it was a great shout, but certainly we'll keep it simple to talk about, "How do I take that narrative to that next level?" so that you can apply within your own circumstance and use that almost as a template to say, "Hey, if I want to broach this issue, how would I do it? Here's a few tidbits for me to start to consider it."

Ralph Meyer: So, the sessions that I'm looking forward to the most is on the first day there is a session about the future skills for a CS leader and developing that muscle and I think that's something that's really important, especially as our industry not only matures, becomes more complex but also within a lot of businesses we're multi-GEO multi-time zone, multi- global instances, as an example, and trying to manage people working from home, working on-site etc., all of those types of elements, are not only challenging, it's very difficult, especially in CS, which tends to be technology-led and we run really quick in tech. So, it's trying to keep up with those types of ideas about how best to serve as a leader in that space. I think another presentation I'm really looking forward to is for the juncture between sales and CS that relationship and we have a fireside chat with Wesley, Richard and Natalia. I've had the pleasure to see both of them, both Wesley and Richard speak before and a lot of their ideas resonate very well with me. (And Natalia – it'll be a first for me to see you present, so looking forward to it!) And just understanding how to, as a CS partner work with my sales partners better. That certainly, for me, is absolutely paramount to bring that mutual partnership and success within our business. On the last day, there is a session that is focused on the digitization and efficiency of customer success and that's going to be led by Stéphane Schneider and Bailey Edgell from Collibra and Culture Amp, respectively. Look, anything that helps me save time, make my day a bit more efficient, make me not have to work harder, but helps me to kind of do something and not have to replicate it many times over and automates, or anything that saves me time from doing mundane tasks or anything along those lines – that makes me more efficient and get more bang for my time – I'm all ears, and so certainly that is something I'm really excited to have a look into, get a few ideas from them about things we could do at our business. We're also changing the way we are working and any of those tidbits for me is going to be massively valuable to learn from them.

Ralph Meyer: So customer success as an industry has transformed over the last few years and, from my perspective, I've seen a lot of value from it and I'll tell you why: quite often technology solutions are massively complicated and the initial implementation is something that goes that the client will go through, but post implementation, or post usage, or post onboarding, there is always a discussion about, "How do we get more out of this? How do we take this thing to the next level?" And that's what CSMs do really well, is to try and find those avenues of value that are on top of the product as well, and also elevating the conversation to a narrative that might not necessarily just the ROI-orientated or time-to-value/ from start-to-finish – is the product set up and running? The other human elements to this as well that enhance that experience. And I think that's maybe where it sits is that we help clients have great experience using our products our tools, you know, do things run always perfectly? No, they don't always run it perfectly. However, the proof in the pudding is how quickly or how you respond to some of those areas and quite often that's the differentiator between one solution to another, is that experience of how things happened and how they worked. And so CSM are that unique piece of greatness that helped companies to differentiate not only their tools, but the experience of working with them and using those tools