Guest: Nick Mehta – The Next 5 Years in Customer Success

[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning, Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason’s Take on podcast series. It’s myself, Jason Noble, here in a gloomy looking London. I’m almost time for the weekend and my partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead in the us. 

[00:00:13] Jason Noble: Say hello, Jason. We are super excited today. We have a very special guest. We’re talking about the next five. In customer success, so really looking longer term. A very warm and big welcome to Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight, and I’m sure a guest that doesn’t need much of an introduction. 

[00:00:33] Jason Noble: Nick, you’re the CEO of Gainsight. You’re an advisor on the board of directors of many tech companies. You are one of the godfathers of customer success. You’ve written the book for customer success. You’ve written the Customer Success Economy book that, that I think talks through some of these really monumental shifts that we need to make today. 

[00:00:52] Jason Noble: You’re an award-winning author. You’ve been with Gainsight, I think for 14, 15 years now,  

[00:00:57] Nick Mehta: and you’ve seen it’s about 10 years.  

[00:00:59] Jason Noble: [00:01:00] 10 years. But you’ve seen the company Yep. Flourish and grow from what it was in the beginning to. Huge organization today that’s leading the way in customer success. 

[00:01:09] Jason Noble: But you’ve also been there to seen the industry grow from where it was to where it is today and how it’s continuing to grow. But you’ve also been pivotal in building, leading, defining the industry that we all know as customer success. You’re a big steel as fan. I know you’re super passionate about physics as well, and I love that. 

[00:01:27] Jason Noble: I’m a fellow physicist. Love it. I love the playback to physics. Everything is about physics and. And of course, you’re a big fan and we are of your music parody vis videos. Thank you, Nick. Welcome. We are super thrilled to have you here with us. We’ve had, we’ll just set this, the record straight. 

[00:01:44] Jason Noble: We’ve had some other big hitters from Game Site. We’ve had Dan before you and Adam but we had to invite you on so welcome Nick.  

[00:01:52] Nick Mehta: So great to meet your guys’ company and I really appreciate it. Love what you’re doing for the community and obviously very honored to be on anything that Dan and Adam were on. 

[00:01:59] Nick Mehta: So thank you. 

[00:02:01] Jason Noble: Nick, I said already I can’t believe anyone in customer success doesn’t know who you are. I, and we are super thrilled to have you on here, but I’d love you. A quick intro from you, but then also what as customer successes in, in, in your own words, and why does this number one driver for growth in teams today? 

[00:02:18] Nick Mehta: Yeah, totally. I used, you did it so well, Jason and I won’t elaborate. Ceo, you of Gainsight been doing this a long time, very passionate about. Customer success in three levels. Really there’s the level of it as a business strategy. There’s the level of it as a profession, which you know that those are two different levels. 

[00:02:36] Nick Mehta: And then obviously we make money by making technology for customer success. And so, I think there’s three different levels that I end up spending time at. And to answer your question, I think what’s really an incredible is over the last 10 years as more and more companies have moved to these recurring revenue business models like SaaS and cloud, they always go through the exact same kind of like inevitable process where they come in taking [00:03:00] all the ideas they had from the old world of transactional selling where, you sell to a customer and then after the sale what you do is you support them. 

[00:03:07] Nick Mehta: You wait for them to call you. And what you realize is any recurring revenue business, at the end of the day, if you’re not. Getting that customer to value and adoption. They’re not going to stay with you. They’re not gonna grow. And if they don’t stay with you and grow, you’re never going to make any money. All of the economics in recurring revenue business comes from your existing customers from the lifetime value them. 

[00:03:26] Nick Mehta: And today, companies think about this in the metric, net revenue retention, we’ll talk more about it, but that metric has become a real north star metric for most subscription businesses and a real way to drive value. So, what’s happened? Companies have figured out customer success is indeed a function, but it’s much more than that. 

[00:03:42] Nick Mehta: It’s really the way to drive value in a recurring revenue business. I love that.  

[00:03:47] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And Nick, as we’ve said, you’ve been with this from the very beginning and you’ve seen such progress over the years. Do you think customer success is really where it needs to be yet in terms of wider recognition and the level of [00:04:00] investment that needs it? 

[00:04:01] Jason Whitehead: Do most companies get it now, or is there still a lot of people out there? Haven’t heard of it or don’t fully buy into the promise of customer  

[00:04:07] Nick Mehta: success. Yeah, I think that the, so if you look inside technology businesses, I think the why and the what are pretty well defined in most companies, and honestly, if you’re a tech company, you don’t know what customer success is. 

[00:04:22] Nick Mehta: You’re just literally, living in a cave and you’re not paying attention at all. And so the why and the what you know why being, okay, you’ve got a recurring revenue business. The, it’s all about lifetime value, net revenue retention. I think everyone gets that, right? It’s so important. And then the what of what is customer success at 30,000 feet, I think is pretty well defined, but I think where the how is where it really comes rubber beats the road, right? 

[00:04:42] Nick Mehta: 10,000 companies practicing customer success, there’s probably 20,000 definitions of how to do it right? Like literally, there’s all these different approaches. Very, And it’s not it, by the way, I’ve thought about this a lot. I don’t think it’s wrong that there’s different approaches because customer success is so fundamental to a business that because businesses are [00:05:00] different, customer success is also going to be a little different, just the same. 

[00:05:03] Nick Mehta: Company A, B, and C’s products are different, which makes sense cause they’re different companies the same way. Customer success is a little different in each company, right? If you have a consumption-based pricing model or subscription, if you sell to big customers or small customers, if your client’s very technical or if they’re more business oriented. 

[00:05:18] Nick Mehta: If you’re an early-stage company, you’re more mature. You have one product; you have multiple products. There’s a lot of flavors of customer success. And so that’s why I say customer success today is much more in the how phase of how do I do? For my business and my maturity, and also one of the things we all make mistakes on is try and apply, a, the model from a company. 

[00:05:38] Nick Mehta: That’s totally different to my model. Maybe I’m a small startup selling a security product and I’m trying to apply Salesforce’s customer success model to my company. It doesn’t apply at all, right? And so that how of, how do I find what works for me? That’s where the energy is.  

[00:05:54] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. It’s nice to hear you say that too. 

[00:05:55] Jason Whitehead: Cause whenever I start with a new client, as part of our customer success consulting, one of the [00:06:00] first things we ask ’em is, what do you actually do for customer success? Yeah. It’s all over the map, And I’ve yet to get the same answer twice. It’s good  

[00:06:06] Nick Mehta: to hear you. Totally. And I think that a lot of it is also, over time you’re trying to learn and improve, just like with your product. 

[00:06:13] Nick Mehta: I think product’s a really good analogy, right? Product isn’t static. Nobody’s Hey, we’re done with the product. We don’t have to do any more product work. That doesn’t ever happen. Customer success is never gonna be done. You know what I mean? People are like, Oh, when am I gonna be done? 

[00:06:25] Nick Mehta: No, you’re never gonna be done. It’s like your product. You’re always getting better, you’re always changing. Your market’s changing. Competition’s changing your underlying software is evolving. There’s new features. Over time the new features are less mature, but your old features are more mature. 

[00:06:38] Nick Mehta: Your new customers are less mature. So it’s a constant iteration. And if you’re in this field, the only way you’ll survive is if you love that. If you love the iteration, if you’re looking to be done and Oh, I figured it all out, you should get a different job. 

[00:06:54] Jason Noble: I think we, we’ve been saying this for a while. 

[00:06:55] Jason Noble: It is, it’s constant change and we’re seeing this rate of change [00:07:00] now in technology. It’s just  

[00:07:01] Nick Mehta: growing. Totally.  

[00:07:03] Jason Noble: You look at our kids and just the pace of technology change for them, they’re Exactly. We’re getting more used to it than we are, but we are that transition. Things weren’t changing and now they’re changing this fast. 

[00:07:12] Jason Noble: I love the way you talk about different flavors of custom success. Yep. That’s one of the best ways to describe it. Cause a lot of the answers are, we always say it depends. Yeah, it does. It depends on so many factors and I think that, That understanding that’s okay. And you’ve got to find and model. 

[00:07:27] Jason Noble: It’s the principles that are the same. This is what we’re trying to do. Totally. What do you see, given that, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges today For the industry itself and then for customer success professionals and leaders?  

[00:07:39] Nick Mehta: Yeah, so the we actually did this presentation at our Pulse conference about six weeks ago. 

[00:07:44] Nick Mehta: And basically we talked about this idea that the future of subscription businesses is this idea of having a more durable approach to growth, right? In the last 10 years with all this crazy, all the money that was out there, the funding, it was growth at all costs. And companies spent a [00:08:00] lot of money on new sales and marketing and burned a lot of money and the economics didn’t matter and some. 

[00:08:05] Nick Mehta: Concepts now, like profit and EBITDA are coming back into fashion, right? And so the question is how do you grow in a more durable and efficient way, and what are the challenges to that? So starting not at customer success, but let’s start with a bigger problem. And so if you looked at that kind of challenge of durable growth and you said, What are the things that people are struggling with right now? 

[00:08:23] Nick Mehta: One thing people struggle with still to this day. Is the idea that they, unless you really have built your foundation of customer success, you’re still surprised too often. That’s one of the core emotions in customer success. You guys have probably both been there too, which is a customer reaches out to you and says, Oh, we’re thinking about churn. 

[00:08:38] Nick Mehta: And you’re like, What? And that surprise really shouldn’t be allowed now, right? Like we have all this data, we’ve got processes, we’ve got systems. So the first thing that people wrestle with a little bit is the surprises. Now that’s, I think, going down over. But that’s something that I think you’ll, if you have that, you’ve gotta fix it. 

[00:08:54] Nick Mehta: Number two, which is, I think extremely timely is scaling without hiring people.[00:09:00] And so this is the thing that everyone, I think every company realized the value of customer success, but they’re also trying to get more profitable or, burn less money. And so therefore, most companies have really slowed down hiring. 

[00:09:11] Nick Mehta: But they’re bringing on new customers. And so therefore, this idea of digital ed customer success, doing things like in-app communications using community digital journeys, pooled customer success, self-service, that second area of how do we scale customer success without hiring more people. That’s the second thing that people rest with a lot. 

[00:09:29] Nick Mehta: Third is, people wrestle with this idea. Why? Why is customer success so internally oriented? We talk about gross revenue retention and churn and upsell, net promoter score. Those things don’t, Customers don’t really care about those at all. And so how do we have more of an outside in approach to customer success? 

[00:09:48] Nick Mehta: How do we bring the customer more into this versus making it just about us? So that’s the third. That’s things like creating a joint success plan with the customer side by side based on their goals. Creating a [00:10:00] community where customers are learning from each other. So that kinda involving the customer, that’s a third big thing that people are wrestling with. 

[00:10:05] Nick Mehta: Fourth is this idea that up till now, I think a lot of companies would say, customer success, your job is to prevent churn, right? Stop, turn, fix the leaky bucket. But the truth is that At some point, it’s not just about reducing churn. Maybe you’ve taken your retention rate from 80% to 90%. Now the question is, how are you actually helping customers to expand? 

[00:10:24] Nick Mehta: And the truth is, it’s not just it’s not as simple as do you do focus on churn or expansion? Expansion often will reduce churn because if customers are doing more with you, they’re gonna be more sticky. And so this idea of, we call it going on offense, how do you move from defense to. In customer success, that’s a fourth challenge. 

[00:10:42] Nick Mehta: Fifth is this idea of how do we do more through the product, right? At the end of the day, customer success is fundamentally about closing that gap between what the product does and what the customer’s desired outcomes are. Actually, Allison Pickens, who is our original coo, came up with that idea of closing the gap, and so that [00:11:00] concept is so important, but you don’t always wanna be closing the gap. 

[00:11:03] Nick Mehta: You wanna be extending the product. Getting feedback to the product team making the product in the app, better at driving it, onboarding and adoption, et cetera. And then finally what we talk about at Gainsight is the fact that especially right now, clients are more stressed than ever given everything going on in the world, our teams are dealing with a lot. 

[00:11:20] Nick Mehta: And so having more of a human first approach to how we think about our teams and our customers, never forgetting that. Like it’s not just. Client or an account, but it’s actually a bunch of human beings. Each of them have their own goals. They’ve got career goals, right? Tracking your, those people and your stakeholders. 

[00:11:37] Nick Mehta: Doing a little bit more of that account management, relationship management. Sometimes you can forget about that when you’ve got all this great data. So those six challenges, we think are the biggest impediments to durable growth right now. Wow, tho those  

[00:11:50] Jason Whitehead: are great. I really love what you said there too and so many different elements. 

[00:11:54] Jason Whitehead: I love the how. Scale your impact without scaling your team, and really helping customers take [00:12:00] more of that, teach Amanda to fish approach where it’s let me build your capacity so you’re not as reliant on us as we go forward. And I think there’s still a lot of room there to happen around that. 

[00:12:07] Jason Whitehead: I’m also, I’m wondering as we look at this and. Do you think that CS professionals are really doing enough to beat the drum for what’s neat and what’s not? And if not, what else should CS professionals be doing with their customers or internally with the rest of their team members to really get everyone else on board? 

[00:12:22] Jason Whitehead: Cuz I think there’s still wide gaps of customer expectations, but also even across, sales and marketing, what they expect versus what customer  

[00:12:29] Nick Mehta: success expects. Totally. Yeah. So I think there’s probably three, if I’ll give one piece a tip for each of the three audiences I think that are really important. 

[00:12:36] Nick Mehta: So one audience. Your product team, We talked about that. I’ll give a little advice there. Yep. One audience is your sales team and one audience is your customers. So let’s talk about each of those three. So on the product team side, I think every CSM in the world has a list of things that they wish the product would do differently. 

[00:12:51] Nick Mehta: Every single at a hundred percent of them, I guarantee if you’re listing, you have that list in your head. Now the challenge is that. If every CSM just emails the product people [00:13:00] inde independently with Okay, here’s my list and here’s my list and the product. People just get a list of a thousand different things, then it’s really hard for them to figure out what really matters. 

[00:13:07] Nick Mehta: And so what I would take a couple piece of advice from a product perspective, number one, is before you go to them, Asking for something, try to go to them to help. It’s basic human relationship. 1 0 1. . So maybe they need help finding beta customers for a new feature. Maybe they need help getting feedback on a new mockup or design. 

[00:13:26] Nick Mehta: Maybe they need help understanding who the best customers to talk to, to get research interviews, be that CSM that’s helping the product team, calling them out on Slack about how great the new feature is, or our customer loves it. Do some stuff to build some relationship capital with the product team before you ask for stuff. 

[00:13:42] Nick Mehta: And then when you’re asking, this is where the leader really comes in, build a process where you’re consolidating those requests, you’re ranking them, you’re providing examples with data and we actually added a feature of gain site that basically does this now, where we’re like, okay. We actually integrate with product management tools and we’re like letting the CSM flag [00:14:00] features, but then letting the PM see, okay, what customers are affected, how much AR is affected? 

[00:14:04] Nick Mehta: So giving like more context and prioritization, and then being willing to roll your sleeves up to help we had a customer event this week and one of the CCO said, Hey, If you’re a CSM and you’re complaining about the product, then you don’t get to complain. If you’re not gonna go, then join the session to give them the feedback and actually talk to talk about it. 

[00:14:23] Nick Mehta: If you’re just emailing into the void, then we’re not gonna listen to your input, right? And so that’s in the product side. On the sales side, I think one of the biggest things people are doing is building more of an integrated methodology for defining the client’s desired outcomes in the sales process. 

[00:14:38] Nick Mehta: What are those goals? What, et cetera? With a bit of a framework, not just like open-ended, but here’s maybe a checklist of goals and then having that automatically feed to the CSM team. So for example, a lot of our clients and we do this too in the sales, in the crm like Salesforce, they’ll have like, when you’re closing an opportunity, what are the clients desired outcomes, What are their KPIs? 

[00:14:56] Nick Mehta: Make it pretty structured. And then automatically have [00:15:00] that create a success plan, for example, in Gainsight, if you’re using that. So it automatically creates a success plan for the CSM with, Okay, here’s the goals and here’s the plan to go achieve them. And so that kind of put pre to post sales hand off, no brainer. 

[00:15:12] Nick Mehta: And then finally, from a customer perspective, I think one of the biggest things that CSMs need to do is be pres. While being consultative. And it’s a real hard balance, right? Yeah. So on one extreme is consultative. I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever you want the product to do, we’re gonna do. But the problem is the customer ends up using the product in bad ways, or doesn’t get value, and then they blame the vendor no matter what. 

[00:15:34] Nick Mehta: Why did you let me do that? And then on the other hand, is the CSMs this is the way you do things. The customer’s our business doesn’t work that way. And it’s Nope, this is the way you have to do it. And that doesn’t work either. And so you have to find this balance of being prescriptive, for example, Our best clients do these three things with the product. 

[00:15:51] Nick Mehta: Which of these are relevant to you? Maybe not all three are. And then actually like hearing them, having it be a dialogue, but being willing to say things like, Our best clients do [00:16:00] X or our best practices, y and having some confidence around that. So those are three, three sets of tips for the three  

[00:16:06] Jason Noble: audiences. 

[00:16:07] Jason Noble: I, I that they’re so varied as well there, Nick, and. The first two kind of products and sales. It’s really building on that kind of growing collaboration that we need. Exactly. Yeah. Customer success is across the business. It’s not one team. This is us all working together and I think there’s so much that we can do to help break down these silos that we still see. 

[00:16:27] Jason Noble: And I love that getting the CSMs involved in product roll your sleeves up, do help them identify those customers. And I, it’s great cuz I I’m not seeing enough of that yet in many organizations and it’s a trend I’d love to see grow more and. Love it. Are you Nick? We’re beginning to see customer success appearing outside of the world of SA and Tech. 

[00:16:47] Jason Noble: Yes. And it’s really exciting to see more organizations and even a lot now in Europe investing in your CCO roles and C level that have the customer focused. Where do you see the next big [00:17:00] growth areas, in terms of new industries for customer?  

[00:17:03] Nick Mehta: Yeah, it’s interesting, we’ve been following this for a long time, obviously out of great interest cuz it six plans are addressable market, right? 

[00:17:09] Nick Mehta: And I think what’s happened is you think about all the other industries in the world and actually let’s start with the fact that what is a tech company, right? It’s a little bit hard to define out cuz it tech is everything to, to some extent, right? But what’s happening. 

[00:17:22] Nick Mehta: You have all these kind of vertical industries where you have the incumbents and then you have often technology based disruptors, right? So let’s take financial service as an example. So you know, you’ve got all the credit card companies and then the banks that accept credit cards. And then you’ve got online payments companies like PayPal, right? 

[00:17:42] Nick Mehta: Or Stripe or anyone else. And so what we find is you’ll have in each industry, The disruptors and the disrupted embracing customer success. Usually the disruptors first. So for example, PayPal has created a big customer success team to manage all the merchants, meaning the people that [00:18:00] accept PayPal credit cards, they use Gainsight, and we work with them. 

[00:18:02] Nick Mehta: And so we’ve seen that. Another example that’s in the disruptor category is in the all. Healthcare, IT technology companies that are using technology to really change the way healthcare works. And many of them now have customer success. Lot them use Gainsight. And so we see that a lot. But then you see traditional companies that are trying to not be disrupted or disrupting themselves. 

[00:18:22] Nick Mehta: So I’ll give you a couple examples there. There’s a big telecommunications company in the US called Lumen. It used to be called CenturyLink. And they’re they basically provide. Broadband and other connectivity. And they used to have more of a traditional sales and service approach, and they basically worked with McKinsey Consulting and created this customer success team. 

[00:18:41] Nick Mehta: And it’s big, huge team, and they basically are trying to have a more digital first experience. Another example is a company called Rockwell Automation, which is out of Wisconsin. They make equipment in factory floors. Now with that equipment, They often now sell software that helps you manage and monitor the equipment. 

[00:18:58] Nick Mehta: And since that software is [00:19:00] now a subscription, they started saying, Hey, we need to do customer success. And more and more of the revenues coming from recurring revenue. And so those are examples where you have big incumbents, these are both huge companies adopting it, and then you’ve got the startups and the disruptors adopting it. 

[00:19:13] Nick Mehta: So I think if you summarized it, you’re probably gonna see a little. in financial services and FinTech. Kinda like the PayPal example cuz that’s naturally recurring revenue. You’re seeing it in healthcare for sure. That’s definitely a big area. You’re seeing it industrials, the Rockwell example, telecommunications. 

[00:19:29] Nick Mehta: Now the thing that these things have in common is they all have some nature of a recurring revenue model, right? So think of financial services. You use your PayPal and on a regular basis there’s a recurring transaction, right? You think of healthcare, there’s a recurring patient coming in, right? 

[00:19:42] Nick Mehta: You think of telco, there’s a recurring billing relationship. And so each of these examples, even the manufacturing, you have a recurring software relationship. And so I think over time, How many companies, 10 years from now won’t have software as part of their business? Zero. Every single company will have it. 

[00:19:58] Nick Mehta: And every one of them will go through this curve of [00:20:00] Oh wow, we saw selling this software, but people aren’t really using it. What do we do? And then they’re gonna go Google, what do we do? And they’re gonna find customer success. They’re gonna find your podcast, they’re gonna read our book. 

[00:20:08] Nick Mehta: And that’s how companies get into this area. I think  

[00:20:12] Jason Noble: you, that example there of the telcos is great cuz it is, We’re the same in Europe. In the uk we’ve got lots of big telcos that have these totally four play models that they’ve, it’s been a subscription service forever. They might have a retention department, but they’re not thinking about growth, what they can do. How do they That’s  

[00:20:28] Nick Mehta: right. And. And even the retention department historically in telcos is your classic reactive retention, in other words. Absolutely. I’m trying to cancel my subscription and they’re like, Oh, we’d love to give you six months for free. 

[00:20:40] Nick Mehta: But obviously that’s. That’s not customer success. So get ahead of the game.  

[00:20:44] Jason Noble: If you could gimme this price now, why didn’t you gimme the price before? Exactly. The other industry, I think, I think there’s a big play in other financial companies like  

[00:20:53] Nick Mehta: insurance. Insurance. It would be huge opportunity over time for sure. 

[00:20:57] Nick Mehta: Yeah.  

[00:20:58] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely. So Nick, [00:21:00] then I’d love what you’ve said so far, gonna ask you to put on your crystal ball for a minute, huh. And within looking in the customer success space, you’ve been here for so long and seen so many changes over the past nine, 10 years, where do you see the changes or the biggest changes in the next two to three years, but then even looking longer term, five to 10 out, if you were gonna go to Nore Adamas here and write down, here’s my predictions, what would they  

[00:21:19] Nick Mehta: be? 

[00:21:20] Nick Mehta: Yeah, so I’ll give you three categories. So number one is that the. The way we do customer success is gonna become mu much more multichannel tied into this digital concept, right? So today, we think of it as, okay, it’s a largely a human activity. Hire CSMs, you have ’em, reach out to customers, right? 

[00:21:36] Nick Mehta: Do meetings, zoom meetings, video meetings, et cetera. That, that, it’s great. It doesn’t scale to all your customers. Also, lots of customers don’t wanna engage that way. Maybe. Maybe they just don’t, They don’t wanna do a call or a QBR or whatever. And so what you’re gonna see is absolutely. Organizations driving this end to end journey where they’re looking at the email communications, the in app, the community, the self-service. 

[00:21:58] Nick Mehta: And right now [00:22:00] that stuff is pretty fragmented in companies. Some companies don’t do all that, but the ones that do the product team’s looking at in app and the marketing team’s sending some emails and support, the communis more of a like support deflection. And so looking at more of an end to end multichannel journey for customer success versus the default as a human. 

[00:22:17] Nick Mehta: Digital first is some way people talk about that. So that’s one, one prediction. Second one is I think that product teams will now proactively want to get input from customer success and solicit feedback, and we’re seeing that it’s definitely the minority, a majority. I think companies are still trying to figure out that relationship, but in the future, product teams are gonna realize CSMs are like their best friends because they really understand. 

[00:22:40] Nick Mehta: The context of why customers are asking for something and what the value proposition is and all that. So you’re gonna see a much stronger relationship. And third is you’re definitely gonna see CS teams owning more revenue. That doesn’t mean the CSM is on a quota. Some people conflate those two. It could be that the chief customer officer has a CSM team and an account [00:23:00] management team underneath them. 

[00:23:01] Nick Mehta: It could be the CSM owns the renewal. Could be they get credit for leads for expansion, but definitely much more of a tie into revenue. Those three things will I’m a hundred percent confident it’ll happen.  

[00:23:12] Jason Noble: I think it’s, you just look at how the industry’s changing and that’s that maturing. 

[00:23:17] Jason Noble: All of those things are signs of maturity and there, there’s a long way to go for it. And I, you know what you said about some companies still don’t do it, but we’re got, we’ve got such a diversity where people are, but such a growth. Nick this has been really insightful. A big thank you once again. 

[00:23:31] Jason Noble: What? What we do like to do is give you one, what we call a bold challenge Question. Yes. The one for you. It’s not that much of a curve ball, I promise. I hope it’s not. I love curve ball. What is the number one thing that a CS professional leader should be doing today in their organizations to really continue the growth of what customer success really is and for their own customer success. 

[00:23:52] Jason Noble: So  

[00:23:53] Nick Mehta: yeah, I think. I think the number one thing is probably if you’re a leader, is spending more time [00:24:00] cross-functionally. So I think it’s natural. You’re a leader, you got your team, you got your customers and escalations and all those types of things. That kind of pulls you in. But what are you doing to relationship build with head of sales, the head of product, the head of marketing, et cetera, and what are you doing to build those bonds? 

[00:24:15] Nick Mehta: Not just tactically Oh, we’ve got a customer situation. Can you help that? That happens naturally, but more strategically. How much time are you spending? Just, let’s spend a half a day together. My, with my head of sales and plan out the future of the customer journey. Let’s spend a half a day together with my head of product and talk about better ways that our teams can work together. 

[00:24:33] Nick Mehta: And so are you taking a step back, spending more of that unstructured time to build those cross-functional relationships? That, that,  

[00:24:40] Jason Noble: I think is brilliantly summed up. And it is, it’s that collaboration. How do we work better as a team? Nick, Love it. This has been such a great podcast. 

[00:24:49] Jason Noble: I, I think all of the real examples you’ve seen about things that you guys are doing. What in the industry is really gonna resonate with all of our listeners. So a huge thank you again.  

[00:24:58] Nick Mehta: Thank you so much Jasons, [00:25:00] I appreciate it really. It’s been great. Thank you.