Guest: Marten Jagers – Turning Strategy Into Outcomes

Jason Whitehead: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. And thanks for joining us for another episode of the Jason’s take on I’m Jason White adhere in Washington, DC, along with my co-host Jason Noble. Say hello?

Jason Noble: [00:00:08] Hello, Jason. Hello. Good evening. Good afternoon, everybody from a very dark and cold London.

Jason Whitehead: [00:00:14] We’re very excited today to have another great guest for this Martin Jagers is here. And Marty is the co-founder of this great technology company called strata. And I love strata app. I’m a huge fan. It’s this fantastic tool for helping you define your business strategy and then drill down into your daily work.

So you always know what you should be doing and how it contributes to your overall goal goals. We use straight up internally at success chain and we’re partnering with them and really excited to have him here. We’re just going to share his insights and experience on. Where organizations struggle with building out their strategies and then actually turning these into goals and outcomes and his insights apply.

If you’re building an overall strategy, or if you’re focused on how to define and implement your customer success strategy or user adoption and strategy, really great stuff. And it’s been a real pleasure to get to know Marty and to learn from him as well too. Marty, thank you so much for being here.

Oh,

Marten Jagers: [00:01:02] very excited to be

Jason Whitehead: [00:01:03] here. Yeah. And excited to Marty’s down in Australia here. So we’ve got. Only great time zones covered. He excited about the

Jason Noble: [00:01:10] true global podcast,

Marten Jagers: [00:01:11] Which means somebody is up early.

Jason Whitehead: [00:01:17] So Martins to jump in. Can you just go ahead and give a brief introduction and tell us a little bit, both about your background and up and how you guys help customers.

Marten Jagers: [00:01:26] Yeah. Fantastic. So first of all, thank you very much. Jason’s I’m really excited to join you guys. They actually just a bit of background about myself.

I I come from a finance background originally with two great companies, American express, and I instead bank here in Australia and, for the better part of 20 years, I’ve been in the technology space. I was very privileged to partner with the founders at current company, Seattle based company called Concord to lead their Asia Pacific business.

And we did that for the better part of three within years. And even what we talk about not necessarily talk about straight up here, but, I’ll share with you the experiences that I had. A lady, a young business and growing it to a sizable business. The challenges I had, which actually led to some of that thinking of straight out.

And then in 2017, I was very privileged to, to partner with an incredible individual who was my co-founder partner at straight out Kodash Richardson and with my technology background and ashes consulting background with Accenture and also being a CEO and also build technology. We come together and looked at the problem, which was the disconnect.

Very simply the disconnect between business plans, the strategy and daily work. And we realized that both of those elements were not living in the same place. They were very static. The plan was very aesthetic and the daily work was running off into a number of places email. Yeah. So we came together in 2017 and put our heads and said, that’s a problem that needs to be solved.

And that was the birth of strata. Back then.

Jason Whitehead: [00:02:56] Fantastic. And I got to tell you, since we’ve been using it, we’ve seen such an improvement in streamlining is fantastic, but we’ll get back to straight up a little bit later maybe to kick us off. Can you tell us a little bit about what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen companies face, but trying to build out their strategy again?

Are there any unique challenges when it comes to building up customer success or customer experience strategy, or pretty much just the same challenges, just a different flavor to the focus.

Marten Jagers: [00:03:21] Yeah, it’s a really good question because I love the word simple and I think the number one challenge I’ve seen is which we sometimes make it too complex.

We are we over, make things more, more complex and more with searching for things to put in there as opposed to making it very simple. To where we need to go. I think that is the first thing. And the second thing, which is really interesting. And it’s one of the things we’ve found that stretched out as we’ve been launching new clients over the past 12 months is there’s a lot of organizations out there that maybe unnecessarily, if they haven’t made it too complex, they actually are not quite sure what the definition of strategy is.

And therefore they get hung up on what that definition is and they want it perfect. Before they launch it out to the teams, which to be honest, strategy doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be clear. So I said, the challenge is to me, is that it’s a complicated, or it’s not clear enough. And therefore for people to follow that is very difficult.

And we help organizations simply we’ll find that framework for their teams and individuals across the organization.

Jason Noble: [00:04:27] I think that’s such a, it’s such a key thing, isn’t it? Because it is that clarity and simplicity of it just to be understood is so important. There are I don’t a lot of companies I’ve worked with customers.

It’s very difficult sometimes to understand what it is and you can absolutely see how organizations struggle with it. How do you see companies going about. Balancing developing a fully in-depth strategy that covers multiple years, not just 12 months, but if you look over a longer time horizon three years, five years, versus being able to remain agile and nimble to respond to immediate needs and opportunities that come up today.

Cause that the two can be very different.

Marten Jagers: [00:05:04] They absolutely will absolutely add different. I absolutely agree with you, Jason, because strategy and AB definition as a knock, defining the definition of strategy for a second, but the timeframe of a strategy is that 1224 month 36 month outlook. So if you can clearly articulate what that knows stories and where we want to go and then how we want to get there and be very clear on that.

That’s a week, right? That’s a wig. Now, if we look at the short term element of that, it, and that’s really where it, and a lot of organizations are getting to them. There’s a lot of talk around the world right now in relation to short-term goal setting, because COVID has added that additional flavor in, we can’t really plan 36 months out because we don’t know what’s happening in the next six months.

The next 12 months, we still think it’s very important to have the strategy, the Atwood, the booking, no stop, very clear and transparent. To every everyone across the entire organization, because this will come back to contextual relevance is we talk about what motivates people. What’s intrinsic in motivation and knowing what people are going is very motivational.

And this is a big topic right now, as you both have experience with all experience, but some more than others sitting in your home office sometimes can make you very isolated from where we going. And a, it’s a hot topic. So strategy is definitely that 1224 month out. And I think the idea of having that 10 year plan that 20 it’s.

Okay. But now let’s break it down and that’s what we’ve done within the  objective and key result, fine with which we may talk about. And the idea is just get everyone focused around the short-term elements of how do we achieve that note stuff. And typically that’s done very step. And this is part of the challenge that we’re helping organizations work with is how do we give it a heartbeat?

How do we give the strategy? And even before this, Jason, I love the question because even before the strategy, who is the organization, what do we stand for? And even that for a lot of employees, especially onboarding is very difficult to get who are we? What’s our heartbeat, what are our values?

What’s our, why. And we’re big fans of some of the settings for, and Roger Martin’s direction, the other capabilities of an organization. So how did we give that a heartbeat and put all that together? So an organization can tell everyone a story. And so it’s whether it’s the values of the organization, the why and the direction of the company, whether it’s the strategy or whether it’s the short-term focus.

That now lives in one simple place. And today that’s not the case. It sits on a document. It sits on a portal. It sits in someone’s mind. It doesn’t come together for every single employee to be clear on what it is we’re going for. And even the day to day work, which we’ll talk about, that’s really the magic in myself.

Tell you the direction to me. We can do the, connecting it with the daily work and making sure everyone is aligned and focused on what matters and realizing that we’re, it doesn’t matter if we’re remote or not. We’re a team, but we are one organization, but one body of people going towards a common outcome.

And I’m really excited what we’ve been able to achieve with our, organize that with our clients on that part of the journey, because where they were working in multiple places. Lack of direction would now be able to keep clean direction in a short period of time, then you get to evolve, right? You get to evolve it over time, which is fantastic.

Jason Whitehead: [00:08:29] I think that’s so true because you and I had this discussion too. So many organizations really don’t have that North star to find, you have more of a collection of past and different, especially with the other thing that you said that resonates with me is the customer success teams.

No, they don’t always know how to bring everyone on to make the team or how to work well with the rest of the organization. This is why we’re here. This is our why even within an entire department. And so much of our audience is that customer success piece that like, if people can get that straight, that this is why we’re here, and this is how we’re going to bring everyone along on our journey so far.

And I think a lot of people either skip that part. They don’t really understand the, to

Jason Noble: [00:09:04] that bit is so important though, isn’t it? Because you do. I think a lot of teams and customer success is a great example. It’s the. W we’re not just here as customer success. We talk often about with the whole businesses around customer success.

There’s a much bigger why you’ve got to see beyond your immediate day, your immediate challenges that immediate team, and is this different way of thinking is so difficult to do.

Marten Jagers: [00:09:26] Yeah, it’s a really good topic of conversation cause objectives and key results were a great framework for getting people focused around a common objective.

But it wasn’t designed to be Jason, that’s your objective and Jason natural. And you go, you then run off in different directions and we’ll see if you come back and achieve it. The idea was to have an objective and then everyone rallies around it. To be able to go and even technology, I remember now I’m not showing my age right now in the two thousands.

When we first put in a CRM system called Salesforce into concur, and it was two guys in Australia before the global business had actually rolled it out. And I remember we got it. I just said there had to be a better way than Excel, but that was my simple logic. There had to be a better way than Excel to run your clients and process.

And then when I got into it, I intrinsically said, you know what? It doesn’t give me what I need to measure, what I need to do day to ultimately achieve the outcome I was looking for. So then I looked to base camp and I put base camp and it became very noisy very quickly. And then I wanted to collaborate different.

I’ll put Yammer and it got very noisy very quickly. And what I also identified with the CRM, just going to your point, it became so isolated by behavior. Cause it was focused on one core set of individuals, but to actually run the client teams and in sales teams, you actually needed marketing. You needed product development, you needed other people inside the organization to participate, to help you achieve your success.

But when we did a license for CRM, we just did it for the sales team. And we just asked them to fill out. And so to me, the technology that we built over that period also became very insular in the way that behavior was built. So it’s a combination of multiple things, how we think as a culture, how we think through technology and when breaking all of those boundaries.

To have inclusive technology, everything should be inclusive in the way that we think to help them with going. And I’m thinking in code times it’s beautiful because people can be so far removed and remote that they’re still connected in a way that really makes sense to them.

Jason Whitehead: [00:11:30] Yeah. And I love that example about CRM, not being inclusive because the license restrictions and everything else.

And I was talking with my client the other day and she was saying, how. They are selecting a tool that they’re going to use for their customer success automation and what they really liked about them when they were going for is it had pretty much like a single enterprise wide license where this is the, be an item that everyone uses it.

We can really democratize that information. I think that’s going to be

Jason Noble: [00:11:55] a different way of thinking isn’t it. But it’s something like that. I think you’ll start to see big shifts around that because you still see a lot of businesses stuck to a usage license model based on people. And that has to change because how do you get that?

Buy-in exactly to your point, Marty, how do you get it to be an organization wide way of thinking that everybody understands?

Marten Jagers: [00:12:14] Yes. Yeah, I agree. A hundred percent. And then that was one of the passions that we had, it stretched out, but. Yeah. W when we talk about strategy, we very much talking about the company.

It’s the company direction. It’s the company don’t stop. That’s the company vision. It’s the company. Y but it was really how did we then break that down in such simple terms. I’ll come back to that simple and measurable cause measurability again, drugs, accountability. But then when we got really passionate about was how do we build a set of tools?

That really enabled the individuals in the teams to be able to align, collaborate, and execute in a way that they want beautiful. Part of it is it’s aligned to the outcome, and where we all said we needed to go, which gives that smallest of tasks that I have to do today. 100% from textual relevance to why I’m doing it.

Because I know it’s going to help us achieve that. And that’s a powerful model. It doesn’t matter if you’re together or you’ll remind that’s a powerful model when truth people truly can see it in a way that’s so simple. And they do get motivated. And so we really took Liberty, not just to do the strategy and the OKR is because I hold the short-term focus of our kind of frameworks.

That’s not okay to do anymore. We went to the next level and said, let’s go build the project management tools and let’s go build the meeting night management tools and the task management and the collaboration and risk management. Let’s build all of these elements that we just do day to day, the day to day behavior, the things you and I are going to do today.

And everyone on the planet is going to do today. Today. We ask people to go to 10 different places to do it. We’ve just built that nice little framework to make sure that it’s so simple for us to do our job. And big guys in what matters. And we’ll talk separately about how do we in Bryce I’ve got a great story that we might give them to them about a young gentleman.

Who’s a client in South Africa and say any young 26 year old individual move inside the technology, the way he did was just insane. And he actually shared something with me. He goes I, actually, every time I, he loves IDs, he’s actually a marketing individual. And he put some at 38 on days and stretched out in the first 24 hours.

And he said to me, you guys mind, you know what? This is so cool because before I’d do it on a piece of pipe or I’ll have a place to not at all. Now I can just put it into straight up and then I can tie it to my plan and really see what those ideas are actually drawing. But the other thing is the ideas that come in with today, if we put it on a piece of pipe would be 900% of the ideas, sit on a piece of paper.

All right, let’s go, let’s create an environment that everyone can guide you, not just on their jobs and what they’re passionate about and, get them an Avenue in the business. So allow them to breathe in a way that really excites them. And we’re creating that. And I’m really excited about that.

That’s the pace on truly excited about all right, because in nightly in individuals and teams, to me is the power of what we do.

Jason Whitehead: [00:15:05] Absolutely. I That’s, that really is fantastic in getting people to move into that. What am I doing on a day-to-day basis? I think one of the things I found with a lot of teams, especially with customer service teams is I hear all the time, like I’ve got so much work to do, and I’ve got so many customers that got a service How do I decide which one what not to do and how do I stay, make sure I’m doing the right things.

And how do I stay relevant question? I see organizations doing that. And I think that’s

Jason Noble: [00:15:28] a tough one. That’s the hardest thing is knowing where to say no, I’m not doing this. Or this actually comes down the list and don’t be reactive. And we’re all guilty of it. Just jumping on something when it comes in and this kind of helps you.

Helps you strategize a lot more about it understanding

Marten Jagers: [00:15:42] when you should do it. Yeah, and it does. And it’s not just the company strategy or the divisional, the tangents, the individual strategy. Yeah. And we did an implementation with a client the other day, and it was really interesting.

We had 10 people in a room and they were client success teams and wanting to be Joel asked the question. He goes, Marty, how and all of this, I say that we’re going to set up the work board and we’re going to have the clients. And it’s all great. Everyone’s going to be able to participate and collaborate in one spice, but how do I prioritize the important over the other things.

Yep. And I, the fact that I asked the question was so blissful. Yeah. There’s priorities in there. You can create things as critical and important and routine, and you can just simply filter down your wake in your day. To the point that he goes to Southern lies are focused on what you define as important and not, and really what we’re trying to do.

And I talk about a nice table with a set of friends, but really trying to ask people to be accountable and to, if I could give you the perfect set of tools, would you take the time to really do the right thing for you and your team? That’s the question, because I think today we out filing.

Yeah, add teams. We finally added individuals because giving them an email and a social thread that goes into the abyss and Google docs and a Excel spreadsheet. And that’s how we’re going to manage our business. I think what ultimately filing out things for success and again, big motivator of what we were doing it straight out, because it’s like build the plan and verbalize it and say, I might’ve got to do then Marty looks there and guys.

It gets back to his email and punches out a bunch of emails, but he’s really not prioritizing what’s important in those emails. He just sees activity. I’ve always said, if you leave people to their resources, busy is relevant until it’s not, and it’s ultimately not relevant when you come to the performance management piece and they say, we didn’t achieve what we said we wouldn’t want to achieve.

And so I think companies and leaders have to take more responsibility for enabling that work framework. For teams to be successful and not just be okay to say here’s the CRM go and answer it all. He’s a Google doc and add in the details and drop diets, but that’s not the spice that we’re working in.

And by the way, the next generation, which I call the now generation, they might accept that they’ll find a better way to work. And in many cases, they’ll leave us behind the lead generation concept. That’s the opportunity that we’ve got in front of us right now.

Jason Whitehead: [00:18:03] Very true. Martin, let me ask you there.

I keep reading more and hear more people talk about OKR. So I know there’s a lot of people out there who have never done an OKR Muller or have heard the term and don’t really understand it a whole lot. I know you guys have done some work in this space what our OKR is and how could a team use them to really make sure they’re focusing on those right priorities.

Marten Jagers: [00:18:22] Yeah. I’m really gonna try and keep this simple. And so to me, everything has to be kept simple. And and what out is not necessarily a bad thing at the dollar tree, we don’t want to, none of the methodology tool, it’s okay. Objectives and key results are interesting for me because I tell them Lenny about them more and more.

And as are saying, OKR tools roll out across the world. The reality is a lot of them have been twisted and bent to make what the company thought was the definition of an objective and key result, which turned out to be a bunch of actions. And that’s not the purpose behind the objective and key result of the OKR framework.

But that was that was famous by Google. And so the objective and key results is simple. And the way that I look at it, because I’m looking at it as steps, right? You’ve got your strategy, which is that 12 month average, Jason Noble, you mentioned at the front end, right? That planning that 1224 months and 36 months out.

And the OKR framework is really looking at the short term focus. So to achieve that, what are the things that we need to do now and, and make sure that we just get so right. We just went there’s non-negotiable we have to get these three, four, five things. And this is where some people that have actually taken, the objective framework and, companies we’ve seen companies have.

Hundreds of objectives and key results that really wasn’t the design. It was really designed to have a small amount of objectives and then fate the key results off that. One of the things that we need to do to achieve that objective and make sure that they’re very clear and measurable. All right. The key results are the measurability side of it.

So really that’s the why that we’re working with our clients. And you say, you know what, some people don’t it’s just not, I jumped into LinkedIn this morning. Guess what? I has a whole library. It’s just a real big topic right now, but. You know what my, my, my advice to your listeners is, don’t be scared of them, but, and don’t worry about doing a million gradings on what the definition of a it’s very simple, clear objective to achieve an outcome, which is part of your strategy.

And then one of the things that you need to do to achieve that objective, and then you either like the old design to get the body of work moving. And that, and that’s really where I see okay. As in the way that we’re introducing our clients that have never seen it, it’s so beautifully simple.

And the other thing too, is don’t hesitate to be like strategy. Some people got on with doing what the strategy is, but when I look at, I’ve got to document it now, is it really a strategy? Don’t worry about it. Just start some way, because the idea of evolution is that you’ll just get better and better.

It’s just same people working in your learning from that working and you’ll get shopper. And I’ve got a great example and it’s actually a local example here in Brisbane. And then. Three weeks. I had shaved more visibility into the business and then having the five years of operations in three weeks. And it’s amazing.

And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to sit down with that organization in a second period by chaos. I guess what we’re going to help them get shocked or at. And they said, this is an evolving practice, but guess what? I’ve never got people all around the world focused on something. I’ve got people around the world, which are struggling through Google docs and all these shared documents to participate in by a Slack.

And now they’re participating on an outcome. You should see the threads that have gone just in that one page and then breathing and then moving, Hey, we’ve got this. Congratulations, Jason and people are now breathing themselves. And so that’s, to me, the power of my chaos and the other way to think about it.

Cause I’m working with a client success team right now is chaos for everyone to ensure that they’re on track. It’s not just for the business and this is where some people really get, mike, I do a consulting job and I get these okay. As all these actions, like just tend to give you a bunch of tasks, right?

There’s all these tasks that need to get done. We’re not okay. This isn’t talking about tasks. I asked her in a clear line of sight of what we need to do and within a timeframe, and then the things we’re going to do to achieve it. And how are we going to measure against it? When do you get a group of people working around that?

That can be a really powerful, but the trade-off is. It’s not just a business tool, it’s an individual tool to make sure I’m doing the right things. I’m waking up every day. Jason, that be, you mentioned it on prioritizing the things that I need to do to make sure that is what we said we needed to do to get to where we want it to go.

That helps me. And so we’ve really gone down to that individual level. And so that’s how I what rolling our cows across their organization, but they’re an incredibly powerful tool, but. Keeping it simple, clear and measurable is to me the magic behind the OKR framework.

I

Jason Noble: [00:23:01] think that they all really powerful when used. And that’s the definitely, I think there’s still a, I’ve worked in organizations where that they’re misunderstood and not used. And I think there’s a risk when they’re misunderstood being completely wrong. What I like about it, there’s a lot of.

Ways of thinking of, okay. It goes from the individual up to the team, up to the functional, to the business, and everybody’s contributing to the overall strategy, which I think is so critical. What do you think Marty, that companies should do to make sure they’re selecting the right OKR? Like you said, you, you could have organizations that have a significant number of them.

Wait, which can be counterproductive, but how do you go about selecting the right ones? And then if we focus specifically on customer success how should a customer success leader within a business set and manage OKR for their teams

Marten Jagers: [00:23:47] is actually really good article actually on our website on this, that was pinned by my co-founder pot and the rest Richardson.

And it says that this the It had it actually, it’s a roadmap for what not to do to set up a chaos. So it talks about what not to do. And it basically says don’t stop with strategy because sometimes the strategy can disjoint what you’re going to focus on because it’s a assigned thought.

Sometimes the strategies and every organization is different, but if you just have lens and said, what I need to do for the next month or the next three months, that is a really good way to say what these are, the top three things that we need to do. So my first piece of advice is really looking because you’ve got to take the main strategy is taking old factors into consideration.

No not just what you want to do and your direction, stats, why you lose what’s the competitive threads. All of those things are the definition of strategy and it’s complex in, by nature, just setting a North star isn’t strategies. I should clarify that upfront, but when you got the objective, you’re just looking at the short-term outcome of that.

But the other thing too, just on advice, don’t see it as an individual or a team or an individual thing. Because what I have seen with objectives and key results is right. This division has that and that individual has that and that sort of stuff. There’s no job on the planet that one person is just responsible for.

So the objective and key result is a business outcome. It’s a business outcome. And so whether we put the table in a group or a company around it, we haven’t decided yet, but it’s really something that the business needs to do to get where we need to go. And so then when you put it around, so the first one is making it simple.

Oh, I say the word simple. The second one is don’t make too many objectives. That’s not the design behind them. There’s a lot of things we need to do in a business, but just to do something really well in the next three months, you can’t do a million things. Where so select three or four things, that’s it.

There’s not even one or two for some organizations just select those things to do really well. And then the key results can flow from that. So just making sure that it’s, there’s just not too many there. And the other side of the equation is don’t make them individual. That’s not the design and this is a new way of thinking as well because our organization tends to be hard Rocky driven, and then we split goals up and you do that. Jason, you do that. And how do you do that? That’s not how the world’s going to float in the future. And we’ve got the first platform to really ensure that people are focused around and everyone coming together to achieve a common outcome. Whether it’s objective key result, whether it’s a success of a meeting or a task assigned, and it doesn’t matter, but everyone should be coming together. They’re the three things, keep it simple. I only do three to four and then ensure that when you’re doing it, you’re not isolating individuals.

Everyone is now responsible for achieving these things. And I think if you do that, those three ways you got to improve everything, engagement, culture, performance, all the things that we want on the marketing slides that says, this is the outcome of our technology. That’s how you get it. It’s whenever I’m truly believes that there ran something.

Jason Whitehead: [00:26:53] And what I like about that is I can see okay, within your own organization, but even using them with customers in customer success, where I was talking about what’s the next QBR EBR we have, meeting with our customers once a quarter for business review. As part of that process, we agreed.

Okay. Our fourth point success within your customer, what you’re going to do, and this is what we’re going to achieve together.

Marten Jagers: [00:27:15] I love that you just gave me goosebumps Jackson. There’s a true belief. He had that in you. That was just so awesome because we spent a lot of time talking about the team that if you rally the team around where we want to go and how we can get them, where they have to get that client fits in that bucket as well.

Outside, even us to like incline. When we work internally on a great tool, let me get self-love for a minute. A great tool called straight out because everything’s sitting in one app. And then we got an email to talk to our client, or other meetings to talk to our client. No, you can actually do that inside, straight out.

You can invite them as a guest. I can’t even say how it, set up meeting agendas and what we’re working on and how we’re doing it. So to give you client that level of visibility and engagement on how you’re helping them be successful. Oh, I love that. I’m all in for that. And it simplifies your world, but it simplifies the client’s world as well.

And the level of success you’re going to have in buy-in and engagement and just being together, especially in a remote framework. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.

Jason Whitehead: [00:28:19] Yeah. So I guess then coming up on our final question here, we’re running a bit out of time here. What should a new customer success leader, maybe someone who’s not had a lot of experience in strategy development and execution, what should they do in their first 90 days to make sure they’ve set themselves and the team up for success?

What are the most, what are the basics? What are the most important things to get? Right upfront.

Marten Jagers: [00:28:35] I think the

it’s interesting because I, I. I went to, when you do chaos strategy, Dutch stock strategy. Yep. But even in this one, I’m going to reverse it a little bit. They found a client success person. I’m looking at where I’m going. I’m looking at where we want to be and what are the things that we need to do because the short-term focus allows us to get where we want to go.

And if I’m talking about client success and how we actually engage and how we, rally everyone around the common good. Of where we want to go, including internal stakeholders and external stakeholders know where you’re going first and then get super clear. And the other one for me is documented that somebody, things that we do in relation to we’ve got great ideas and I want to do this.

I want to do that. And I write it down on a piece of paper and my world is good. And then we go get into day-to-day grind and busy on reactive stuff. We lose sight of what it is that we were going to do. But these guys back to Jason Nye was prioritization side of it. If you document it in a way that it’s super clear, everyone understands it internal and external stakeholders.

You can constantly keep on checking back. Am I doing the right things to get where we need to go? So I’d ha have you out go have it very clearly documented in straight up if I could say, but in a system. Not paper. We’ve got to remove ourselves from this position in a system that everyone has visibility to.

Then the last piece I’ll always say, you have the best, easiest way to measure that to there’s. There’s a lot of discussion around inclusive and exclusive collaboration. And this is a really powerful one, especially if we’re talking about client, when we’re talking about client success, because Jason White had, if you and I have a conversation.

And Jason Noble’s involved and that’s all designed around how do we make something successful? We just excluded Jason Noble from the conversation. That’s an exclusive collaboration tool. That’s it a conversation that was purposely designed for the three of us to move something forward. So really it’s straight out.

We’re driving very heavily towards inclusive collaboration. Whether I not to have the Jason novel participate, so not, he can see how it talking. He can see how they’re thinking and he can contribute in a way that can mayfly move something when he can see it. But if we can’t see it, it’s exclusive collaboration.

And then this to me is another big one, especially if we’re talking around client success, because no one person is going to achieve the outcome. We’ve got to collectively do it as well.

Jason Noble: [00:31:19] I think this summit is that, that exclusive collaboration, it’s almost not collaboration. Isn’t it? I love the way I think Marty, this has been such a cool conversation.

Really massive. Thank you. I appreciate you having to get up very early as well. What we always like to do as part of our podcast is at the end of the Ms. Really put, give out kind of guests. What we like to call a kind of a bold challenge question. The one we want to give to you is what bold actions would you challenge a customer success leader to take starting today for them to improve their customer success strategy over the next 30 days or so?

So what kind of bold things can a customer success leaders do today? Thinking about what you said about strategy, no chaos to help them improve their customer success strategies?

Marten Jagers: [00:32:02] I love the word bold. Because bone for me is dine except, something is broken. Don’t accept it on that. And I look at I’m a technologist, so I look at tools, right?

If there’s something there within your framework today that is letting you down, that is letting your team down, that is letting your clients down. Make change happen, right? You do not sit there and accept it as, because this is the, where we have come from which the hierarchy tends to hand down.

What that is, I think is right, because they’ve made a business decision, but they sometimes fall to see what we need within our teams and our groups and what we ultimately need to guys. So I would challenge that and there’s something just not working right within your structure. Challenge it and make change happen.

And don’t be quiet about it. Really make change happen because that will empower you. It will empower your team and lead your team in a new direction when they see that action happen as well. Because if the lead is frustrated, you can guarantee the individuals within the teams are frustrated as well.

Jason Whitehead: [00:33:08] That’s fantastic. Thank you so much. And Marty, thanks. We really appreciate your insights and your lot of great work that you’re doing in the space. And I’m a huge fan of what you guys have done learned so much from you. As we close out here, we want to invite you to give a quick shameless plug for strata or any other initiatives you have going on and let people know how they can reach you and how they can learn more.

Marten Jagers: [00:33:27] Yeah, I think I’m shamelessly plugged all the way through. So keep going. Penny is not visual. Cause I’ve got that’s it. That’s how bad I am. I’m a walking billboard. So yeah, it’s just a thing that I thinking about when I think about strategy and daily execution it’s works for companies of all sizes.

Yep. So whether you’re a small company of three, five people, when you’re a company of 50,000 and I’ve spoken to, I’ve got sole operators as clients, and we’ve got really large clients who are using our tool today. So really it’s a universal problem, the disconnect between a study framework or strategy and dialing work.

And if that’s something that you really want to solve and how do you actually then drive everyone around the collective. And so the common purpose and the common direction. But then how do you enable your teams with a simple set of tools instead of sending them off into the abyss of tools that then drives lack of clarity and visibility and direction.

Strata is perfect for that. So really it’s a tool for all organizations from that. If you want to learn more about straight out and you can definitely reach out to the Jason’s or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn Martin is which I think Jason, you were posts and also our website straight abscess.com.

And I have a look at that and you can jump on and contact us and also have a free trial Australia. Fantastic.

Jason Whitehead: [00:34:44] Thank you. And we’ll include links in the show notes below. And as Marty said, you can always reach out to me. I’m more than happy to lend my 2 cents of using strata from a big fan. But thank you so much for being here.

Marten Jagers: [00:34:57] Yeah, I really appreciate it guys. Thank you very much.