Ideal Customer Behavior

[00:00:00] Jason Noble:  Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of the Jason’s take on podcasts where it’s got myself, Jason Noble here in a, not too sunny London. After the lovely four day bank holiday weekend, celebrating the Queens. Do you believe that we’ve just had here and my partner in crime, Mr.

Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:24] Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason. And thank you everyone for joining us from

[00:00:27] Jason Noble: Washington. Absolutely. We are both really excited to be here for change. We don’t have a guest. This is the first time that we’ve done one of our own, just us talking to two Jasons. I, and we’ve had some really great guests over recent months.

We’re really extra. I’ve got some more coming up, so please do stay tuned. But today we’re going to talk about ideal customer behavior, which is a really, I think, interesting topic, something that we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. We talk about ideal customer profile, which customers. Yeah.

But all we think he about what behavior we want for our customers. So Jason, I had a chat. We thought this would make a really interesting episode. We’re really excited by the number of people that are listening to the podcast as well. It’s great to see the number of downloads growing. If you do like this episode, please feel free to subscribe and listen to previous episodes.

There’s also, as I said, other ones covering some amazing guests coming up and some great ones over the last couple of months with guests. And don’t forget to hit the like button. If you like this. Jason, I will throw the very first question over to you, sir, as we’ll normally do as well. Sorry.

Before we start with questions, as we normally do, we’ll end with a well-armed with a bowl challenge question, which you always like doing just to put something out there, but let us give a very brief intro. If you don’t know us, Jason Noble I’m based in London, in the UK, currently the global VP of customer success for organization called.

Finley is a mobility company in the automotive space providing data solutions and technology around insights and opportunities for customers in the mobility space. So I look after our European business unit, but then also our global customer success business being there three and a half years really enjoying it.

Jason, quick and Tribune. Great. Thanks

[00:02:08] Jason Whitehead: everyone for joining us. My name is Jason Whitehead. I am the co-founder of success chain along with my wonderful business partners to NAB it more who most of you would probably come across at some point. She is a legend in the customer success community, and we do a lot of work to help customer success teams drive their skills and capabilities and increase user adoption.

Our big focus. Also helping to drive change and adoption of technology in your customer’s organization. So check status, sustain.net. And before we jump into the first question, my partner here skipped over our bold question. So as we always like to start out with a big challenge to get people, take bold action.

As you listen to this episode, and we’ll remind you that the young ones. What bold actions can you take throughout the entire customer journey, including the sales process that they’ve been drive your ideal customer behavior. So give it a thing, give it a good read. If you have ideas, we’d love to hear your thoughts because this is a

[00:03:00] Jason Noble: fun, fun concept.

Thank you for the reminder. I’d forgot that we talked about that at the beginning, as well as at the end, I loved your intro. That’s what you guys are doing at success. Jane, I think is really key because. You help organizations with this? Aren’t what is customer behavior? What do we want our customers to do?

And quite often you need that direction coaching from experts. But let me ask the first question to you, Jason what do we mean by ideal customer behavior? As I said in the intro, we talk about customer journey. Customer profiles but customer behavior. And why are we talking about it? What’s the context about this?

[00:03:34] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, no, this is a fun topic for me. And I’ve been really excited about it. We’ve have great conversations with you and Sue and others. I think. When talking about our customers, we often talk about what is it that they’re doing our meetings or what is, they’re not even showing up to meetings or what are their end-users doing.

And people have, they’re so close, but they really aren’t being explicitly. What are the behaviors and actions we need clients to take that are going to drive their success? And our let’s be honest. It is about mutual success here. And, when you get thinking about it from even a business model term, back before this is the push-in model, pre Salesforce day, the customer owned all of user adoption and a Fitbit breast, and it was up to them to get their user, their people, to use systems and to create value with it.

And then when SAS came on, They really transferred a lot of that user adoption risk from the customer to the vendor. And the question becomes then if the customer doesn’t take the actions required to get value, then you know, the vendors struggles, and this is really the heart of customer success.

And yet we still find that most organizations that are buying you, you don’t know what actions they need to take internally to get value from technology. And they don’t know what to do or they won’t do it. When I get thinking about ideal customer behavior is really there. How do we map out your war customers for taking the desired actions that lower our risk is a vendor and there’s as a customer and increase the likelihood of success.

And in turn, this increases the likelihood of longterm renewals and expansions. But I think the distinction here is really by dressing desired behaviors. You lower the risk for both parties and you increase the likelihood of longterm successful parties. And instead of focusing just on. Playbooks or milestones or things like this, but what are the actions people do that?

Try success and stop in. If they’re taking the wrong risks, how you can trust those behaviors and really get the correct actions. And that’s really the heart of what it is as we go through there. One of the things that I often talk about when working with customers, and this is the constant, how do you change someone?

Else’s. And I throw that question out there and I just let it sit in a room and people think about it and they, him and they haul. And then they’ll talk about a little things here and there. But the short answer is that you don’t, you change your own behavior or you change the environment in which the behavior of others.

And I think there’s a lot of examples we could come up with around us, but ultimately what we’re talking about here in ideal customer behaviors, what are the things that we can control as a vendor that will help influence someone else’s behavior? What are those environmental factors and what are the specific actions that I, as a vendor, as a customer success professional can take that will get them there.

And how do we map that out in a well thought out and effective approach? So that’s my contextual take on what are your thoughts? And when you think of ideal customer behavior, what does it mean?

[00:06:14] Jason Noble: I like that, the kind of idea of the mapping at the end. I think this is something that we don’t think, we don’t think about what we mean by behavior.

What are we trying to get our customers to do quite often you’re focused on that end goal, the outcome, but how do we get an X part of those steps to get there as well as a tactical plan, there are behavioral steps and exactly what you say, getting we’ve talked before about change management.

This is part of that. If we’re asking our customers to change behind. That’s something that’s more deeply ingrained on them and I think even harder to do, but I think we’ve got to look at what we mean by behavior. And I think a great way of defining is it’s the actions that our customers or even prospects are taking or not taking.

And what we’re talking about here is the specific actions of individuals. If you look in the dictionary, it’s very interesting. This, the behavior, what it means is the way in which one conducts or acts towards. So we’re talking about how our customers act towards us potentially and towards other people and what do they do towards us.

And I think that’s really important to know that there’s something behind what this means. And I think when you look at this from a psychological perspective, you always get the behavior that you’re rewarding. Like you said, in your intro that Jace or rewarding or even reinforcing. And if you don’t get the desired response, From a customer or any individuals, you need to look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

Don’t keep repeating what you’re doing. If it’s not getting the right behavior. I think it’s too easy to fall into that step where we’ve got a playbook. This is how it works, but you’ve got to continually change that. But you’ve also got to look at who is the. Th that is rewarding. The behavior. Is it the company?

Is it the individual? W well, let’s have a conversation while the points we’ll talk about in a bit, but about incentives and rewards. And I think it’s really important to do that because you do, when you go in, when you have a company that gets you to go into training, I know you guys do this a lot at success chain.

They discuss problems that they’re having like costumes, not attending meetings, not following up on agreed actions. And all of these are specific behaviors. That need to be addressed changed, and this is what constitutes ideal customer behavior. And I just think it’s a, is when I don’t think we’d really thought about it in this holistic approach until we talked right the other day.

And it’s a very interesting thing. And it does, if you’re trying to change it and influence how people are using doing things, it’s a very difficult thing to do.

[00:08:49] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. I think about it too, in the sense of as a parent, you’ve got your children and when they start to behave one way.

You’re like I can’t control your behavior. I’ve got to figure out other ways to get you there. And usually it’s, we talk very explicitly in terms of behavior, oh, be on your best behavior. Oh, you were acting out or this or that. Let’s talk about how you’re going to behave when it gets to this event, whatever.

And we don’t do that in the professional context as much. And I like what you were saying about the examples of, oh, do they take my call? Do they show up to the QBR? I can’t figure out how many times I’ve had clients come up and call us and say, I just can’t get these people to even take a call or they’ll feel for one meeting, but they won’t show up again.

Oh, they’re getting rewarded for that behavior. Either. The reward is they feel they’ve saved time because they don’t value their time. Or no one’s giving them no, one’s giving them a punishment for not doing that for not honoring their commitments. So I think it opens up a lot of ideas. When you look at

[00:09:43] Jason Noble: it does nothing.

There is, remember the episode we did on the psycho psychology of customers. There’s a lot as part of this as well, which absolutely. I love that one. I do. If you’ve not listened to it, haven’t listened to that one. I think it’s one of our most listened to ones, but what what are some examples of behavior that.

Our customers to take that we can influence and change. What are your thoughts on that, Jason?

[00:10:04] Jason Whitehead: I think there’s a lot of them at different levels of the organization. You really need to think through that. I like to start at the leadership level to say, what are the actions we need to customer executives or leaders to take to really set their organization up for success and hear that internally they’re doing the right things to drive adoption and change success.

For example, pumping heads, fuel rewards. If you might even offer them, you prefer pricing, video, things like that. Sign a senior person in the organization to have ownership for adoption, not forgetting the system lock. Everyone can get a system live. That’s no big deal, but getting the system to be a top 10 and used in a way that creates value and that you can measure that, the simple act of assigning an owner, there has a huge impact. And there’s a lot of. Follow on Domino’s from that. I think, the other thing is providing the resource and a plan for change and adoption for this effort who the project team complete, at least 85% of the actions within to due dates, you can get very specific around what you’re going to.

Get the executive pretend at least two TBRS and be an escalation point for issues. There’s a lot of things like that, that you could do that. Oh, if you would take these steps in so many times, because half of my business is also working with buyers of software to help them drive adoption internally that’s such a great piece, but one of the things that always comes over as the executive site I’ll do whatever it takes to be successful.

No one’s ever told me what that is. And don’t ask me to, do you know what. But I think it was also then having them set adoption goals within the organization as well, too. So incurring the all data’s loaded within a required timeframe. I have several customer success teams come and they say, we get the system live or we get the system largely integrated, but then we have to wait weeks or months even to get the data from the customer for them to start using.

You’re saying it’s been six months and they’re not going to renew. They haven’t gone live by what they, so putting some things around those and know, then there’s also looking at things like, do we have the right number of logins and transactions in the system by a certain due date? Are we using the right modules that are going to create value or we have the right people using it.

But I think there’s a lot of tool specific things that you can come up with as well too. But one of the

[00:12:09] Jason Noble: things come to mind. I liked the idea of, and these are all it’s trying to define those triggers to that action. So it’s this kind of call to action. And I really like this cause it, this is when we’re looking at what we want our customers to do to hit their success goals, how they can do it.

And even if we look at tools that we use, but having those triggers that then say this is what you should do. And we can apply that to this as well. And I think it’s so applicable to this. I was going to say, I think this is the key with this as well. Is this around behavior? What were we talked about?

Ideal customer profile on a previous episode as well. And I think that the big difference here is your ideal customer profile talks about who is a description of what they are today. This is who your organizations are, who your customers are. What we’re doing here is talking about how they need to act to achieve success.

And this could be individually. This could be groups of people. This could be companies. So this talks about what they need to do and how they’re actually going to need to do it. And I think that’s the key differentiator here,

[00:13:13] Jason Whitehead: I think you’re absolutely right. And it’s also different ideal customer profile that’s a marketing and a sales focus issue like, oh, target these people.

This is what they might look like. But then even you might have five companies that, that fit your ideal customer profile in terms of size industry. But then when you start to engage with them and the first thing, oh who’s going up for meeting. Who’s getting these deadlines who are doing those things.

You might have huge differences and the likelihood of any, one of those being successful will change in the cost of service, going to be very different. So I think part of this is even mapping. This is what we said earlier during the sales and marketing process. So how can you identify and try to influence.

Pre-sales behaviors, for pre-purchase behaviors to really assess and analyze is this person, or is this company going to take the actions required to be successful for them and for us, and you can structure these engagements, pre sales and. We’ll give you some pretty good indicators that you can influence the actions they want, but this is a very different way of

[00:14:11] Jason Noble: thinking.

Yeah, I think that’s the big thing here is this is a different way of thinking and it is, you’ve got to acknowledge this, make a note of it, identify on the map, what do we want these people to do and how do we, our customers and how do we help them on that journey? And what do we do when there are issues and gaps and we have to correct it.

I think that’s important to do that. And this is why. I think calling out the distinction between this as a behavior, what they need to do to achieve success is so different to what this ideal customer profile that we talk about normally.

[00:14:43] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. And it’s a big, I think, if you not a lot of sales folks, I imagine right now we’re talking about what are the actions that my customers need to demonstrate today to, to show that they will be successful tomorrow.

And how does. Request those analyze if they’re doing them or not. And I think if you can get there, but it will be a bit of a heavy lift for them. I think one of the things that would be interesting there, who is during the sales process, having the salespeople, I should discuss with the customer here are the actions that you’re going to need to take to be successful.

Moving forward in a very behavior-based approach and having a sort of mapped out, this is what successful behaviors look like. This is what’s this festival look like for. And be able to effectively evaluate their ability and motivation to do that. And will they do that? And how, what are some of the proof points we can have with that?

And then really identify who’s going to be able to get there and who won’t. And it’s a different way of thinking. I think it’s cool. Let’s shifting gears a little bit. Jason, tell me, how do you think we could incorporate this idea of ideal customer behavior into customer personas?

What does that look like?

[00:15:45] Jason Noble: I think that’s a really interesting question that I think many personas today that we look at are focused on buying behavior with our customers and they don’t take into account what the customer will do after the purchase is complete. So it’s about. And if we do, we look up and our cost recently on this, but you look at customer personas from a buying point of view, how do we start that engagement with them, but not what they do after this issue, where the behavior comes in.

And I think you really need to incorporate it to incorporate into your personas, the experience the individual has in leading change, adoption success with technology. How do they do. Have they had great success elsewhere before getting technology and services implemented and have they used it to create value?

Have they never done anything like this? Are they responsive and open to taking actions internally to drive adoption success? Do they think it will just happen? And a lot of this does go to change management. You’ve got to walk them through this path as to how they do it. And I think it’s really important to include.

The actual personas behavior, Allah, and the anticipated behavior into your personas and look at how it can shift your engagement with your customers throughout the life cycle. So how do you need to change how you are engaging with new customers throughout that life cycle? And again, that’s something that I don’t think we think about.

You know how you’re engaging with them at the outset when you’ve got the initial launch, even on the sales process versus how you engage with them on a renew or when there’s a, an issue with support. When there’s escalation, that’s got to be very different. I think that’s really important to remember that.

I think, some good examples here. If you look at, you can have conversations with customers that difficult conversations. Really struggle to lead technology adoption in their organization. If they can’t do it. And you can have really challenging conversations as to what, why they’re doing it. But what you need to do is really help them understand what happened.

When their organization can do this, what are the steps to take to help them achieve success? That, that I think is a really key thing is to walk them through that process. Or even if you’ve got a customer that takes a perspective, like people just have no choice when it comes to using it. But that again, the worst case there is it piss people off.

The don’t want to do it. They want to be, why am I doing this? Why do I need to make this change? Why should I change? Why should I change my behavior? I think by incorporating these behavioral aspects into the personas you’re looking at and expanding that persona from just being about buyers, you can drive a rule a lot more from this and really engaged with your customers better.

And I think you could also start looking. Being able to forecast the likelihood of them being able to achieve value quickly, so that time to value. But then also how likely are they to renew? How likely are they to grow and expand? And I think you need to adjust your behavior and efforts accordingly when you’re having these conversations.

And I think this difference of how you engage with your customers and how their behavior looks is a really critical thing. But let me ask a question to you then, Jason. In practical terms. What does this really mean? How do we do this? What do we need to do? Definitely you’ve given some great insights and ideas, but on a real practical level, how would we implement looking at ideal customer

[00:19:16] Jason Whitehead: behavior?

Yeah. Cause it always comes down to that too. And before I jumped into the answer for that, one of the things has always used to come up with the user adoption clients that I’ve had is I would ask them the question. If you had to put in place a user adoption project plan from the point of go live out for five years into the future, could you do.

That specific actions that you should be putting in there and the resources that you’re going to be to how to say this is what it’s going to take to, to drive and sustain effective adoption over the longterm. And the answer is most people don’t. And I think very similar to this concept of ideal customer behavior might be doing things really.

Some people could probably do it a little bit more, and then a lot of people will need help going through this process. But I think that the five step process, I think the first one. It’s to really identify what are the desired behaviors that your customers need to take in their organization? Not in the organization.

We drive success on there because, ultimately it’s the customer’s not successful. We’re not successful as a vendor. So this can look at things like what are the actions the customers need to take, but engaging in your organization, like returning calls, attending to BRS, completing action items on time, providing the data, all of those things that we talked about already at an organizational level, So that’s what they need to do when interacting with your organization as the vendor, but then also what are the actions they need to take us by their own organization to chiefs.

And this is things like providing the required resources, driving change in adoption, ensuring systems are used on a daily basis. We actually had one client that part of what we had to do with them is get them to agree, to put other projects on hold, to take work off of people’s plates. So they had the capacity to do what they needed.

And that was a required action. They had to take in their organization to really drive for success. I think, as part of this process to identify the team, to have expertise in adoption programs. So you’d have ideas around what are the specific actions that, that can most customers take to be successful.

And what are the commonalities then that you can ask for all the way through? So that’s really step one is, what are the actions in the perfect world a customer would think in their organization and with us that the trucks. Oh, you have other stuff thrown out before I go

[00:21:17] Jason Noble: on. Hi. Yeah, I think I, not on that, but another thing I’d look at is, another key step what’s the next one on, I think is how do you map out, look at how you map out how you’re going to incentivize these behaviors?

I think that’s really key. You talked about it earlier on. But what are we trying to reward? How do we want to incentivize the right behaviors? And you can look at financial awards and non-financial awards. You can look at company awards for customers. You can look at individual rewards as well.

And I think what you should try and do though, is combined into buckets, get to combine these rewards into buckets that really show, or even the kind of actions into buckets that show all the required actions to achieve. Given a certain reward package. And I think that’s really key. So it’s like a tiered approach to it.

I think the key thing with all of this though, is any incentivization you do is keep it simple, start small, test something, iterate, be agile around it and make sure that it’s achievable. And I think we’ve got to look at not overwhelming our customers, not upsetting them, not taking too much of their time, but making this to be.

A natural piece of how they work and how they flow together. And that for me is the biggest challenge. You changing behavior is difficult. I, and if you can do it in small steps, easy steps, it becomes. More natural transition. So it becomes a natural habit for our customers. So the more complex you make it, and the bigger overload it becomes is really difficult.

And I think that can really throw things off. The other thing I’d look at as well as how do you determine how to track your customer actions and which ones. You should reward it, incentivize, how do you find the right words to do that? I think there are plenty of ways of doing this.

We’ve done previously using a standard CRM tool. You could look at customer success platforms, customer success management platforms. There are other ways of doing this behavior as part of the journeys and the steps there. And I think that’s really key. I think the other key thing I’d say is you need to make sure that you want to map.

[00:23:17] Jason Whitehead: Before you go on the I think one of the things too, that you said that made me think was the incentivize and rewards and behaviors piece, an example of that came to mind and I talked with a former client about this was how would you do things such as in order to qualify for this discount, either out of renewal or for your second progress payment or something?

That you’ve completed these critical tasks in the first 90 days. And then you may have these infections objectives within 90 days. And she was saying, oh, I was thinking the other way of, you have a free resource, a CS resource for 90 days, and then we would start to have to charge you for that resource, as opposed to you get the resource.

But we’re going to discount you if you achieve these goals within that timeframe. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities there.

[00:24:01] Jason Noble: I think there is you’re right. It’s looking at it, as you said, package it up, build these buckets as to how you do it. And I think that’s the key thing. And there are lots of ways of doing this and, you ultimately want your customers to see the end game.

Where is it we’re trying to get to and what. What’s in it for them, why should they change their behavior? And that’s the really key thing. This has to be beneficial for them as well. And I think that’s the important thing to highlight and

[00:24:25] Jason Whitehead: relate that to was the idea of, having some incentives and rewards for the company, like the discount on our licenses.

If we do X, Y, and Z, by this timeframe, we’re going to prioritize and make sure our teams do that. But also for the individual. So I know of another organization they were sharing. If certain, if a T users or administrators just on tasks by a certain date, they would give them pre access to a certification course or a training course that would help them in their individual careers.

Or there might be a here’s you get an invite to our conference or a discount on the conference or something like that. So I think for a lot of organizations, you can get very creative with what are the behaviors that you want to incentivize to reward, but you have to think differently about it and really understand the audience.

Not just what’s important from what’s in it, for me, it was important to me, w what’s going to motivate me what are rewards that are going to stick. So that was just, something came out. And then you covered step three, which was the determine how to track customer

[00:25:19] Jason Noble: actions from that.

I think the, the other kind of steps falling on for this. You just go through these quickly, I think step four, mapping to the customer journey, we’ve talked about your ideal customer profile customer journey, map that behavior to. What do you want customers to do during the sales phase, during onboarding and after make sure your playbooks are adjusted your messages, really, to help customers do this and build these behaviors and rewards into your success plans.

You said that earlier, how do you change it so that they renew within 90 days? Build that into your playbook, build that into your success plans. And I think that’s really what you can do. It’s the first time you’re doing this, run a test, pick some select customers, run a pilot, see how it works.

I think the other kind of step five is really about how you manage internal change in your, as the vendor, the partner, your organization, to ensure that all of your teams, customer success, onboarding sales, everybody’s aligned around how we manage our customers, how we help our customers. And you may need to change some of our incentive plans into.

We may need to train people, train our teams and having the right discussions to explain why these are being changed. But it’s important to look that, we’re looking at our customer’s changing behavior. There are changes that we need to do.

[00:26:36] Jason Whitehead: You I’d like that too. Cause when I talk with sales folks all the time salespeople work there they’re complex and they worked there in some structure and you want to change where they spend their time and effort.

That’s how you do it. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. And imagine what a different process it would look like. Pre-sales if your field folks were saying to your prospects, here’s the price for what this is, but if you can do these three steps, completed, within the first 90 days, We will not to give you a refund, give you a discount on your second payment, equal to X.

So you’ve got to get the stuff done them first 90 days, if you’ll even 91 days over, you don’t qualify for that incentive rebate. But then that’s one conversation they should be having upfront that, oh, here’s how I can make this, T risk is for us and for our customer and lower the price for them.

But then I think the blended piece that you touched on. Now adjust the sales person’s compensation, where they’re part of their commission is their customers achieving this 90 day mark or whatever day it needs to be. So if the sales folks haven’t set the right expectations with the customer about the value of getting something done in this timeframe or the sales folks haven’t reinforced with their customer, these are the behaviors that make them successful or make the customers.

The salesperson should be considered as a couple in their jobs. So just there their

[00:27:48] Jason Noble: stuff before I think it is you just got to get it all right. I think that mapping this out is the right way to do this. Cause it can be very complex, and you’ve got to start small. Test to right.

Try that again, pick some customers, but let me ask you a question about GGS. If there’s a gap between ideal customer behavior and actual customer behavior, what do we do? How do we.

[00:28:14] Jason Whitehead: That’s always the same one. Again, coming back to, with our kids about what you would want it to happen in a certain situation, then something completely different happens.

I think part of this though, is that you need to really establish those relationships with your customers. From the very beginning that you can talk about behaviors, you can talk about actual results in the behaviors you’ve observed and having those conversations. I think for a lot of CS folks that they get very uncomfortable.

Conversation. If the customer hasn’t been doing what they agreed or they perceive it to be uncomfortable. Immuno my response usually is there are no uncomfortable conversations. Once you become comfortable having a direct conversation, we’re all adults here. Let’s just talk

[00:28:52] Jason Noble: about it.

Absolutely.

[00:28:54] Jason Whitehead: Here’s what it’s going to take to get to. Be successful. Here are the, here’s how we provided align boards and pillar my during the initial meetings. And if we missed these, here’s what you can expect from me. Here’s my behavior is going to be, I’m going to be very direct with you that you did that.

The Mark’s going to ask you what happened in your organization that prevented you from doing so I’m going to ask you what you need from us to get back on. And then I’m going to ask you for that behavior. And I’ll just highlight for you the rewards that you’re eligible for going forward. If you do X, Y, and Z.

And also that you’re not like, Hey, in some cases here’s where I’m required to escalate this issue up in your organization as part of our agreement with your leadership in your organization. So here’s what it needs to look like. But I think there’s also. Ask them for the behavior that you want, because you want to strain psychology in school.

That was also just a key piece. This is a behavior I’d like you to do to commit to this by this date, deliver. Here’s what it looks like. That smart whole piece, I think you need to be prepared and by telling the customer before the behaviors occur, what they can expect to happen when it does occur, you make it easier for them.

They’re not as defensive about the situation and it makes it easier for you to say, Hey, remember when I. What we’re here now. Here’s what it looks like, but let’s fix this problem together. Okay. But let me throw over to you then. So with all of this in mind what does all this mean for a CST and what do they do with all that we

[00:30:12] Jason Noble: talked about?

I think that’s such a great question. Isn’t it? Cause you’ve, is this something we haven’t thought about? Are we doing something wrong? Does this, over-complicate what we’re doing? And for me this doesn’t just apply to a CS team. It applies much wider, but I think. Th the key message to this is we’ve got to be conscious of this.

Be conscious of customer behavior and what we want our customers to do, how they can do it, how we can help influence them. I, and it’s really being aware of ideal customer behavior throughout the journey throughout the life cycle, all the way from sales and prospecting through to renewal. It’s have your team be conscious of this.

And it’s another thing that we’ve got as part of our tool set that we can help our customers. Yeah, I think you need to focus on the behavior to try and take a step back from it, understand what the behaviors and how it differs from the ideal customer behavior you’re looking for, and then identify those actions that we can take to influence it.

And I think this is really key that ability to step back and be aware of this is very important. And quite often you can get caught up in the emotion in the moment rather, and get distracted from this. And I think if we’re aware of. What the ideal behavior is from our customers. And we understand that we’ve got it written down and then we can see and document what their actual behaviors look.

We can start to understand why there’s a gap, why this is happening. And then through some of those methods we talked about earlier on, we can help influencing the situation, change that behavior. And that’s the key thing. So I think a lot of this is about that understanding and acceptance that this is something that we need to be conscious.

Understanding that we can influence behavior here, that we can get our customers to move to this ideal customer behavior and why they should move to it. I, and then understanding what we need to do that. I think for me, those are the really key things, but like I said, This really doesn’t apply just to your CS team.

It applies to all of your business. Imagine a support team. You imagine a customer is phoning up. They’re going to be angry, upset. Something’s not working. Understand that behavior, preempt that behavior and start getting them to where do I want them to go to what might expect them to behave and how can I change that behavior?

Those for me are really the key thing.

[00:32:30] Jason Whitehead: I like those a lot. And I agree wholeheartedly. I used to disagree in organization development and a lot of that was rotation of patients pills. And the big thing always there was this quote, use yourself as a facilitator. And how do you come in and be a change agent?

I think part of that was recognizing the actions and behaviors and dynamics of the group and the individuals that you’re working with. But then also being able to just take a step back and be aware of your own behavior and how you’re showing up in influence. And when I think about customer success teams, I think this is a really big lift for some folks and especially folks who are more in the I don’t know, more of the transactional elements of customer success, as opposed to the I’m a behavior driver.

I’m a facilitator, I’m a leader of change for my clients. It’s a different piece I think. And it’s going to help a lot of folks be more effective to take that step back. I think also related to that is. And as a consultant, I see this all the time. There are some clients or some individuals where I’m not the right person for whatever reason, it’s the personality clash, or we just have different orientations with.

It can recognize pretty quickly. I’m not going to be the one who’s going to be able to influence this person. So either I need to find someone else who can do it in my organization or my client’s organization, or I just need to take a step back. How can I think as a customer success professional, once you’ve built your skills, where you can influence behavior of most of your customers, then making sure that you have the room and the grace to step back and say, I’m the wrong person in this situation.

You need to get your phone. Who’s going to get the right person. Anyway, those are there a lot of the things that come to my mind, I think this has been a really great conversation. We’ve talked about a lot of stuff here from a process for doing this and why you need to talk to them about incentive and rewards, any last thoughts about ideal customer behavior and how you’d like to see it moving forward in this together.

[00:34:15] Jason Noble: I, yeah, I think for me, one of the key things is I think, first of all, that, that acceptance and understanding that we’ve got to start looking at this, particularly as customers’ organizations are dealing with more services, more products, we’ve got, we’ve just come out of the pandemic, that’s going to affect behavior.

People are very, more wary about things like this. We’ve got other external events. There’s the whole economic situation that we’re seeing right now. And that understanding that how other things can impact behavior. Understanding what they’re doing is really key. And I think this conversation just gives people another tool set as to how to handle this and just be conscious about that.

And it is, every human being that you do with that behavior is coming from somewhere. Either they’re trying to get somewhere, they’re trying to avoid. I, and it’s trying to understand that and what we can do to navigate that. And I think it’s a fascinating subject. I really do.

I think we would probably need a qualified psychologist next time to talk to us, but I think it really is. It really is a great conversation. I, and there’s so much from it and I, as we saw with the psychology of customers, I reckon we could easily do another one on the next step from the.

Let me ask the bowl question and JC you skipped it. I skipped at the beginning. You reminded me. Thank you for that. Just a reminder for our listeners. What we always like to do is do a bowl question just to have you think about what bold actions you could take to really help this.

So the one for today is one of the bold actions that you could take throughout the entire customer journey. So not just any CS part, but the OCS team part that the whole customer journey, including sales. That helps shape and drive ideal customer behavior. So have a think about that. We’d love comments.

Feel free to comment on the podcast. Feel free to send us a message, but let us know again what are the steps and actions that you can take to help shape and drive our teal customer behavior throughout the ideal, the entire customer journey. We’d love your thoughts on that guys. A big, thank you, Jason Noble here in London.

Thank you very much. Really enjoy the conference.

[00:36:18] Jason Whitehead: Don’t chase somebody down here in DC. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you listening and hope. They’ll turn them against you. Thank you so much. Bye

bye.