Customer Success Playbook S3 E49 - Joe Di Grande - Tech Touch

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Ready to rethink your approach to customer success without draining your budget? In this episode of the Customer Success Playbook, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger sit down with Joe Di Grande, founder of Joe DE's Tech Touch, to demystify tech touch strategies. Joe shares practical methods for building a tech touch framework even when your data is scattered and your budget is tight. You'll discover how understanding your goals, auditing your current data, and leveraging freemium tools can set the foundation for scalable and impactful customer success initiatives.

Detailed Analysis: Joe Di Grande dives into the evolution of "tech touch" — from a basic method of handling long-tail customer segments to a full-fledged strategic pillar within modern customer success playbooks. He emphasizes that success doesn't start with the fanciest tools but with a clear understanding of your goals and the data you already have. Joe cleverly outlines how even spreadsheet-based strategies can kick off a winning initiative if you keep your eyes on key lifecycle markers like contract dates.

Resourcefulness takes center stage as Joe highlights a roster of budget-friendly tools — including Zapier, Apollo.io, and Tango.io — that can empower even the scrappiest startups to automate engagement and education touchpoints. By focusing first on aligning data and customer lifecycle stages, organizations can set up low-cost experiments that yield big insights and pave the way for future investment in tech success platforms.

Whether you're a startup looking to stretch every dollar or an enterprise recalibrating your customer success operations, this conversation offers a refreshing, grounded take on scaling smartly. Joe's energy and real-world examples make this a can't-miss episode for anyone seeking to modernize their customer success playbook with tech touch strategies.

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Episode Transcript

Kevin Metzger (00:05):
Customer success.

Roman Trebon (00:10):
Hello everyone and welcome to the Customer Success
Playbook podcast.
I'm your host, Roman Trevon.
Join, uh, with me as always asmy co-host Kevin Metzker.
Today we're talking tech touch,uh, without the hefty price tag.
So we'll get into what techtouch is, what that means, and,
and how do you rule it out.
Kevin, happy Monday.

(00:30):
Uh, you excited to go, uh, on,on the Tech Touch week here at
the Customer Success Playbookpodcast?

Kevin Metzger (00:36):
Absolutely, and I'm excited about our guest.
We've got Joe de Grande.
Did I pronounce that right, Joe?
Yeah, that's it.
That's perfect.
Thank you.
Founder of Joe DE's, uh, techTouch.
He helps, uh, companies likee-marketer and Business Insider
Drive significant retentiongains.
Joe, welcome to the show.
We're excited to have you here.

Joe Di Grande (00:57):
Awesome.
Thank you Roman.
Thank you Kevin.
I appreciate it.
Uh, happy to be on.

Roman Trebon (01:01):
Yeah, Joe.
Well, let's get right into it.
So, uh, can you explain to ouraudience what, what are we
talking about when we say techtouch?
Like what is tech touch?
What is a tech touch strategy?
And once you do that, what isyour number one tip for
launching a tech touch strategy?
Uh, especially if you don't havemaybe perfect centralized data,

(01:22):
or maybe you don't have a big,massive budget of tools to roll
something like this out.

Joe Di Grande (01:26):
Yeah, no, a hundred percent.
So Tech Touch originally startedas a, uh, a segment of customers
and really, when I say a segmentof customers, you're long tail.
So a lot of businesses, uh, tookkind of the B2C approach where
like Mark, you know, marketing,uh, operation scenes are.
How they communicate with thecustomers, right?
If you subscribe to Netflix,you're not going to be

(01:48):
communicating with accountmanager.
You're gonna get standardmarketing messaging through
automation and so on.
So that approach is kind of whatwas taken into the tech touch
world.
And then focusing on long tail,because again, long tail is
typically a lot of customers byvolume, but a cheaper, you know,
a RR annual contract value,however you define it in your
org.
Now it's kind of shifted to anactual strategy itself.

(02:10):
Now what does that act actuallymean?
So the use of technology, uh, tomanage your book of business.
Um, and that could be from emailautomation.
Now even ai, it could be the wayyou have a customer portal or
knowledge base.
Um, it can be.
Anything that you're using toscale the way you interact with
customers and provide value, um,is essentially tech touch and

(02:32):
even now more commonly known asdigital customer success
strategies as well.
Um, mm-hmm.
So that's a little background asfar as now when we're trying to
keep in mind, um, budget.
Right?
The biggest concern withcompanies are a few things.
One, if they don't have thetooling, two, the data.
I would say take a step backfirst and focus on the goal that

(02:53):
you have in mind, right?
Are you trying to focus on along tail segment of customers?
Or maybe you have, uh, hightouch customers that are larger
accounts with large user bases,and you need to make sure that
they're being taken care of aswell.
Um, so figure out what that goalis.
And that could be anywhere inthe life cycle.
It could be onboarding,implementation, it could be even
renewals.
Focus on that, figure out yourKPI, then.

(03:16):
Understand your data.
That's my first recommendation.
And understand one, is itsiloed?
That's number one.
Is it living in differentsystems?
Which odds are, if you have anyconcerns, probably is, but.
Then understand is it beingupdate?
Who's updating it?
Is it a rep or is it an actualsystem that's updating it?

(03:36):
Right?
So is it basically the end usersgoing in the product and they're
labeling their, their title ortheir user persona and that's
getting sent to, let's say, yourbackend data warehouse or your
CRM in the best case scenario,or is a, a account rep, whether
that's a CSM or a sales personduring that transition process
that's updating it maybe on anopportunity or a deal or.

(03:59):
Some sort of custom object andthat's more so inputted by, you
know, a human now.
Figure that out first, then seehow you can leverage it.
My always recommendation is atfirst, if you could even, I'm
not a big fan of spreadsheetsinitially, you always want it
going to a CRM or a customersuccess platform.
But to start, it's okay.
You know, break it down and thenfigure out what you can actually

(04:22):
trust and then seeing how youcan, you know, leverage it for
either automation.
Um, in this particular example.
And in addition to that, the,you're gonna also want to make
sure that you tie that into yourinitial goal.
Um, you could even break it downas simply as contract dates.

(04:42):
That's always my bestrecommendation too, because I.
There's always a start point inthe contract and the end date,
and there's always gonna becertain stages that should be
happening during that time.
If you have those two keythings, you could pretty much
start to experiment with a techtouch model.
Um.
Keeping it in budget.
Tons of freemium solutions.
Actually just posted somethingon LinkedIn today on this.

(05:03):
Um, you know, first evaluatewhat you do have in the
organization.
Odds are a lot of teams don'trealize that you could do this
with marketing technology, salesenablement, SalesLoft, outreach,
and then again, marketingautomation tools, et cetera.
So check out those.
If you don't have that, maybeyou're a really, you know,
scrappy startup.
See what's out there.
There's one Zapier.
I heavily leverage it for mybusiness as well for automation.

(05:25):
Their PO copilot is amazing tosetting up those workflows.
In addition, that there are somefree solutions like Apollo do,
uh, io, where it's more of asales engagement platform that's
automated, but.
You can leverage it for thosesame touchpoints.
I mean, there's tons of, youknow, freemium marketing
solutions as well.
And if you wanna talk about froma actual, like an education

(05:48):
standpoint, knowledge base,there are even solutions that
will track your steps in orderto create that documentation.
One I actually leveraged quite abit was tango.io.
It was previously named Tango Usand that was great as well.
So there really are tons of waysin which you can.
You know, launch something at alow budget to also prove that

(06:08):
value down the line, uh, toinvest in more tooling.
But initially just focusing onthat business case first.

Kevin Metzger (06:15):
So Joe, just to kind of break it down, really, I
think what I heard you saying isyou wanna identify kind of what
your problem is, identify whatyour current process is, where
that data is, and then look athow you can use a tool to kind
of potentially automate orfacilitate the process.
Is that really, and that, andthat's kinda your high level

(06:37):
tech touch strategy.
That's the breakdown.
A

Joe Di Grande (06:39):
hundred percent.
That's the, the best way to putit.
At least to get started, that'sfor sure.

Roman Trebon (06:44):
Good.
Well then you're coming back,Joe, on uh, Wednesday, right?
We're gonna, we're gonna dive ina little bit more.
You're gonna be talking about a,oh, uh, uh, an interesting
topic, a bloated tech stack,right?
How do cus companies get hereand what you can do if you find
yourself in that situation,we'll get more in this tech
touch.
I, thanks for defining it.

(07:04):
I hear all these.
I've heard digital touch.
I've heard tech touch.
I'm glad we're all using thesame vernacular, which is, which
is awesome.
To our audience.
Make sure you subscribe like theshow.
If you subscribe, you'll getnotifications, and so when our
Wednesday episode is released,you'll get a little
notification.
You can check it out.
You'll know when our episodescome out.
Uh, come out throughout theweek, Joe, awesome job.

(07:27):
Again, Wednesday's one bigquestion, focusing on how
companies can avoid wastingmoney on bloated CS Tech stacks,
and how can we fix that problem?
Don't miss it.
Until then, Kevin, keep onplaying.