August 29, 2024 • 46 mins
Chris Regester, CCO of PlanHat, shares his story of an early-stage startup transforming into a successful global SaaS business. He shares the importance of identifying and nurturing talent, and the power of a client-centric approach in building and scaling a software company. Chris discusses PlanHat's unique focus on post-sale customer management and how bootstrapping shaped their business culture. The conversation offers practical advice on creating value, maintaining profitability, and the critical role of customer objectives in driving business growth.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Best (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with
(00:02):
myself, Matt Best and my cohost, Jonny Adams.
Jonny Adams (00:05):
Hello.
Matt Best (00:06):
Hi Jonny. And today we are joined by the fantastic
Chris Regester. And Chris is oneof the founding members and
current CCO of plan hat. Planhat are a customer platform
built to acquire service andgrow lifelong customers. Chris
is also a wealth of experiencein growing and developing SaaS
software organizations over hisillustrious career so far. So
(00:28):
Chris, thank you for joining us.It's fantastic to see you. I
know SBR and plan have beenpartners now for some time, and
we talk a lot about customersuccess, or as it's often known,
CS for short, and what would bea fascinating place to start
today's conversation. Just talkto our listeners a little bit
about where things started outfor you and how your journey
(00:49):
began.
Chris Regester (00:50):
I started my career at a great company called
meltwater, which at the time waslike 40 people. They were just
launching in the UK. It was likea PR tech company, very small.
They'd come out of Norway. I waslaunching in UK, joined there in
a sales and account managementsales and CS role, and then very
quickly moved and opened up thebusiness in Asia Pacific. So
(01:11):
they wanted to grow very quicklyinternationally. They took a
team to the US. They took a teamof two to Hong Kong. I turned 23
the day I moved about a monthafter I moved to Hong Kong,
moved over and started buildingup the business, and spent best
part of seven years over there.So running sales, CS,
recruitment, strategy,marketing, everything, building
up the business. Built intoabout 25 million. We opened in
(01:34):
Australia, we opened in Tokyo.We opened in Beijing, Shanghai,
Guadalupe, Delhi, Singapore.Hire people in those locations,
bring them at the Hong Kongincubate and then open up the
office. So then ran that, ranthat region, which was a great
big adventure. And then by thestage, meltwater was about 100
100 and 20 million AR globally,and it had grown very quickly in
(01:55):
all these disparate markets. Andthey wanted to start up a
revenue operations function. Iwas asked to take that on. And
the idea was to kind of herd thecats and bring the madness back
and try and build some sort of,you know, central processes and
central strategy andconnectivity between all of the
disparate offices around theworld. So I moved back to
London. This is where my firstdaughter was born, and then
moved into a rev ops role. Andthat was kind of the journey
(02:16):
from about 100 million, 120million, to about 450 so this
big exciting thing. Did lots ofacquisitions, and I was in the
rev ops role, ultimately tookthe company public. Big, big,
big adventure.
Matt Best (02:26):
That is quite the journey, and the international
element there as well, right? Sofascinating to experience all
those different cultures,especially as you're building
something new. That must havebeen really interesting.
Chris Regester (02:35):
I can't underestimate how important
getting internationalexperiences in a career. At one
point, I also ran our SanFrancisco office for a little
while as well in the middle ofthat thing. So got some us
experience too. But working andbuilding out Asia Pacific was
just so enjoyable, just so manyfun experiences. You know, how
do you hire an office in Delhi?If you've never been to Delhi
(02:56):
before? For example, there wasjust so many we ended up with an
office in an art gallery in ashopping mall, which was
fantastic and quirky, but alsostrange. When everyone's
working, sat on the phonetalking to customers, and, you
know, mums are pushing, youknow, prams past the office
window. So lots of excitingadventures along the way.
Jonny Adams (03:11):
Chris, it's lovely to have you on and even hearing
the story there is, isfantastic. What was fascinating
about your story there wasaround the journey that you've
been on, you know, withoutputting you on the spot too
much, what's the one standoutthing that's enabled you to
continue to grow? You know, fromlessons learned, if you think
back to that time where youstarted, you know, what's that
one thing that's really helpedyou to continue to grow?
Chris Regester (03:33):
It's a hard one. One genuine lesson that I
learned from the founder and theCEO of meltwater, which I think
is just like a it's a beautifultruth, and it's something that
just makes so much sense. Hejust said, like, talent is
talent. Doesn't matter where youare, doesn't matter what your
experience is. Talent is talent.And so you just have, you have
your eyes open talent. Like, ofcourse, you can't build a career
on your own. You have to buildit with the people around you.
So just look for talent. Thatwas what we found building in
(03:56):
Asia Pacific, sort of how Iworked in the US. Talent is
talent. You just got to find theright pockets of it.
Matt Best (04:01):
And that's fantastic. And a recent guest on this
podcast, we were talking aboutemployee satisfaction being the
forerunner to clientsatisfaction. And I think you
know, talking about focus ontalent, focus on people, and
seeing that as your key leverageand your key opportunity for
growth is, I don't think manynaturally think like that. And I
think that's a reallyfascinating bit of insight. And
we really want to dive into thisconcept of client centricity
(04:23):
with you today. But as iscustomary on the podcast, and
just before we get into the meatof things, we'd love to hear
something that was particularlyinteresting in your week.
Chris Regester (04:32):
Okay, well, recently, I had the good
opportunity to go to theOlympics, which was, I think,
just phenomenal. And there areso many elements to it that were
that were fascinating. I saw theBritish gymnast Briony Park win
the gymnastic trampolining,which was extraordinary. If this
whole software thing doesn'twork out, I'll probably go off
the gymnastic trampolining next.But the most entertaining part
(04:54):
of it for me was we went out tothe north of Paris and went to
this hockey match. And I'd say,you know, guarantee them. I. She
played a lot of field hockeygrowing up, I'd say the vast
majority people in the audiencehad never seen a hockey match
before them. Suddenly, thepeople sat around me had never
seen a hockey match before intheir life, but it was France
versus South Africa, and theamount of passion and love that
(05:16):
was shown during that match wasjust amazing. The I'd say that
the hour and a half of thematch, it was the most important
thing in everyone's life. Andjust seeing all these French
people, who, you know, everyoneknew before the Olympics had
been very cynical and skepticalabout popping planning in a
totally Parisian way. I can saythis because my family's part
French, but they, you know, veryreason they've been, you know,
complaining. Oh, so it's beensaid, I'm going to leave and go
(05:36):
to the south of France and getout. But then they were there,
and in the moment, they wereabsolutely belting out the
Marseilles. They were just belt.It was just phenomenal. Just
endless, endless chanting ofAiles. But then also, like, you
know, what is this sport? Howdoes it work? It was so much
fun.
Matt Best (05:51):
Love that energy, right? And it just get, getting
energy from, from places, so wedon't necessarily expect it. And
I mean, I know I didn't get achance to go in person, but just
even hearing it on the TV, itwas, you could, you could almost
sort of feel the power comingthrough. And as a rugby fan,
I've had many experience in thestad de France listening to that
being chanted in my ear. Yeah,they really get behind their
(06:12):
team. It's fantastic to hearthat support.
Chris Regester (06:14):
So much passion.
Matt Best (06:16):
It's fantastic. Wonderful, Jonny. What about
you? Can you live up to thathigh standard?
Jonny Adams (06:21):
No, I can't, because it does draw me back to
then the 2012 Olympics inLondon, I have to say, when I
was fortunate enough to go. AndI think one of the things that
spun out for me is I wasfascinated by the weird and the
wonderful events that went on inthe Olympics at that time. So
yeah, brilliant for you talkingabout that, Chris, and thanks
for sharing the story. For me.You know, it's been a bit of a
(06:41):
realization we're about to haveour first baby, slightly
nervous, panicking. What we'retrying to do is we're trying to
train our one year old Spaniel,and he's a working car Spaniel,
so they have high levels ofenergy. And what I'm coming to
realize after the third trainingsession with this trainer is
that it's not the dog that'sbeing trained, it's definitely
me, and then you can see theimprovement from session one
(07:04):
session two, or the lack ofimprovement. And I feel that
from the outcome of that, I'mabout to go on a journey that's
going to change my whole world.From being a parent. I'm a dog
parent at the moment, I'm goingto be a human parent soon, and
I've really got to recognizethat a lot of this is going to
be driven from good parentalleadership, good awareness, good
understanding, and I'm dreadfulwith the dog, so I better pick
(07:25):
up my quality with my new childthat will be arriving, but I
can't wait to be a dad. Matt,what about you?
Matt Best (07:32):
It's funny how we seek inspiration in some of the
strangest places. But I've had areflection of my own. Over the
last couple of weeks, I've beenback out on my bike a little
bit, which has been really goodand really energizing. But for
once, I've stuck with it for asort of for a period of time. So
rather than doing one ride andthen giving up for another three
weeks and then going back anddoing it, I've done sort of back
(07:52):
to back, fairly decent bikerides recently. And something I
noticed, if we think about thisin the context of growth and
sales, is how the power of, kindof sticking with it and then
tracking your progress. So I'veclimbed the same hill three
weekends on the bounce, and thefriend that I go riding with
shared the Strava link and thePB that we achieved last week.
And you just think that's thatthose little wins, right? It's a
(08:13):
small goal, but these juststepping stones that gives you
that motivation and that driveto go forward. So yeah, that's
what I was celebrating in thispast week. Awesome. So Chris,
diving into your experience andthe insight that you could share
with this audience, when itcomes to kind of client
centricity, we talk a lot atclients about client centricity
with our clients, but also forourselves. And I think I see
(08:35):
that the importance of having aclient centric approach. And
obviously plan hat is reallybuilt around that, and the plan
hat CRM software is built aroundthat client centric approach,
and it's perhaps unique focus inperspective of the customer,
rather than perhaps coming at itfrom a sales or marketing
pipeline perspective. So how hasthis client centric approach
(08:56):
shaped the development andgrowth of plan hat in your eyes?
And how do you ensure that thatkind of permeates throughout
every level of the organization?
Chris Regester (09:05):
That's a good question, you know. So context,
so plan head is about 200 peoplearound the world where, you
know, we refer to Plan head as acustomer platform. You know, we
sell a CRM software, a CSPsoftware and a professional
service software. And you know,the idea is that people can
manage the entire lifecycle andcustomer within plan had, but as
you rightly said, We rightlysaid, we've come at it from a
post sale point of view. So wesaid, if you look at, you know,
(09:26):
traditional CRMs today. SoSalesforce, your HubSpot,
they're already built pre sale.So HubSpot starts life as a
marketing tool. Salesforcestarts life as sales automation,
sales pipeline in that juststarts life focusing on post
sale. And our rationale there isthat post sale is just
inherently more complicated,more data. The data is time
(09:47):
series. There's more activities.The activities are more complex,
and it's more cross functional,and it's inherently you're
trying to build a morecomplicated and solve a more
complicated set of problems.Then you are pre sale. So it was
felt that it was very natural tostart post sale, solve the
complex problems, architectaround complexity, and then
(10:08):
bring that and add in the presale components. It's wrong,
which is what we've, you know,which is what we've now done.
But in doing so, we bootstrappedthe business for a very, very
long time. So, you know, when westarted the company, handful of
people and we said, Look, we'renot going to have any commercial
team members. We're not going todo any marketing. I'm going to
have any sellers. We're justgoing to have people who are
(10:30):
trying to figure out what thisset of problems are that we're
trying to solve and the rightway of going about it. So for
the first four or five years,totally bootstrapped. No, not
really a salary insight. And arereally building this out,
thinking very hard till we hadabout 100 employees, which is a
lot for bootstrapping. And youknow, then it gets pretty scary
as well, because when youbootstrapping, you typically
only have three months of salaryin the bank account, and you're
(10:52):
always a little bit nervous. Youhave a bad quarter, and suddenly
it all goes a little bitsideways. But then we did a very
large Series A, and we raised$50 million series A but because
we've been bootstrapped, it'svery much in our DNA that
anything you do has to generatevalue, and you don't just spend
unnecessarily. So even today,we've barely touched that 50
million because, you know, ourculture is to run the business
(11:14):
profitably and ensure thateverything is focused around
value, value creation of everyindividual. There's no fluffy
roles, there's no flappy work.It's value. And when you have
that mindset, you realize thatat the end of the day, the
reason you exist is to deliverobjectives for your customers.
Because as you build a businessvery quickly, all of your
(11:35):
revenue, all of your inherentvalue as a business, is in your
customer base. It's not in yournew business pipeline that's all
hopes and dreams and forecasts,but the actual business is in
your customers. And so as youscale a business, what matters
is, can you deliver objectivesto your customers, and over
time, can you retain and growthem? So I think that bootstrap
nature of the business justinherently makes you value
(11:56):
customers so much more. Youknow, if you have an idea and
you know, someone gives you 200grand, and then you, you know,
you get a kind of a proofconcept idea, and you turn that,
you get 2 million in seedfunding, then all you care about
is churning out that pipelineand proving that you're going to
land new customers. But ifyou're having to fund the
business yourself, you realize,like, No, we need the customers
to renew. We need them to grow,because that's how we're going
(12:18):
to make payroll. So it's verymuch in our DNA to focus on
customer centricity and customervalue, because otherwise the
business would have fallen apartvery early on.
Jonny Adams (12:27):
That's a great set of statements that have lots of
value within themselves, and Ican make some assumptions on one
of the points you made earlieraround complexities from
onboarding onwards, just for thelisteners. Could you just
describe a couple of examples ofthe complexities.
Chris Regester (12:43):
Yes, I think that if you, if you transplant,
it's like there's morecomplexity and data. So
traditional CRF systems alreadybuilt around transactional data,
right? So an opportunity can beopen or closed, deals can be won
or lost, like typically, thingsexist in a binary state, and
that's how things are. So youlook at HubSpot data or
Salesforce data, everything'svery binary, but when you're
(13:05):
dealing post sale, what mattersis time series data. So that
just means it's more complexdata, and it's just, you know,
just infinitely faster amountsof data you got to think about
because ultimately, post sale isabout understanding current
state, comparing it to priorstate, and thereby inferring
future state. And you're tryingto do this across everything,
right? So all your data has tobe on a time series you can
(13:27):
understand development. Sothere's just vast amounts of
data, and you need that timeseries in all of your product
analytics and ticket volumes andemail threads, in survey
results, in product feedback,and you name it. Every concept,
even revenue, ultimately, istime series, right? What are
they spending with you overtime, and is it increasing or
decreasing? So there is a sortof inherent nature of time
series in modern recurringrevenue businesses and many
(13:50):
other types of business. Andthen there's also this process
complexity, where, if youimagine a marketing and a sales
funnel, it's a relatively linearset of processes. You develop
pipeline, top of funnel, then atsome point, you know, BDR gets
engaged, they hand it over to anAE, or whatever your model is,
and ultimately it closes. Andwhether that's, you know, with a
(14:10):
human or as automated as onecompany versus another, but once
they're a customer, there's somany things you got to think
about. So how do you onboardthem? Are you onboarding the
company or the different users?How do you ensure there's
adoption? What about changemanagement from prior systems?
You know? What about when youhave any product rollout, you
got to do it all again. What doyou do around renewal? What's
your renewal strategy? How doyou do stakeholder management?
(14:32):
Every company ultimately movesup market at some point, like
there's just so much, there's somany more processes, and they're
more complex, and critically,they go on forever, right? They
go on free. It doesn't stop itlike, oh, close one. Let's move
on. It goes on forever. So it'sjust inherently more complexity,
both on data and process.
Jonny Adams (14:50):
And you know, thank you for the explanation. It
resonates, you know, you look atthe buyer complexity, so the pre
sale piece and how thosesquiggly lines can sometimes not
make. That linear approach aswell. But what you've just
described there feels like theif you were to draw that image
out as you described, it wouldbe a really complex set of
processes and lines allconverging and moving away from
(15:11):
each other at points. So thatwas really, really helpful.
Matt Best (15:14):
I think the interesting thing for me here as
well Chris is the and comingfrom a sort of CS background
myself, I think there's all ofthat complexity that exists
within the team in terms ofprocess and the journey that the
overall additional customerjourney complexity. The other
thing is the various differentintegration requirements. And I
think, like that's such a hugepart of it. It's always sort of
(15:35):
liken this to my experience inthe the trading world. And if
you have a front end tradingplatform. I like a Bloomberg or
whatever, that define what itis, because everybody starts
there, right? It's the first,it's the it's the point of
contact for the end user. So thetrader is originates the
activity, and they originate itin that platform. Therefore that
platform dictates downstream,and it's those middle and back
(15:57):
office systems that have to doall of the joining together, and
the seller tape and the glue andthe staples that that knits it
all together. And I guess that'swhere, again, plan hat and where
it's originated with thisclient. First is going to have
that complexity of right? Weneed to take from a billing
system. We need to take we needto pull from a IT Service
Management System. We need topull from the product itself,
(16:18):
because we need to understandwhat that usage looks like, and
that extra layer of complexitythere in implementation causes
more challenges, but it's socritical as a CSM having all of
that in a single pane of glassview in order to serve the
customer most effectively.
Chris Regester (16:33):
Yeah, I think that's so interesting when you
think about kind of enterprisesoftware, and you know,
ultimately, near respect to aplan out what you care about is,
yeah, how sticky is yourproduct? And one of the key
things is, just like you sayit's like you need to be, you
know, if you're a point of dataentry, you're just inherently
more sticky than if you're justa data recipient, and so you
always want to be a point ofdata and just like typically
ticketing tools, you know, theticket is created there. It's
(16:55):
sticky in, in the stack.Likewise, the new business CRM
on the on the post sale side. Ofcourse, you know, you know, CSMs
account managers are workingwith their customers all the
time, so there's data entry tothat level. But in general, in
many organizations post sale,there's just not been as
influential as the salesorganization or the support
organization. So it's lesssticky. I think you're totally
right. But for plan head, yeah,the extensibility, native
(17:17):
integration. So we have sort ofthis vast library of native bi
directional, no codeintegration. So the idea being
that you could quickly connectdata, then organize it, and that
starts to give you the power ofthe organization. If you're on
the post sale side, there'salso, you know, firmographic
data and enrichment you need onthe pre sale side, it's kind of
the same story, right? You'vealways got to bring data
(17:37):
together.
Jonny Adams (17:38):
I'm going to challenge the, you know the
notion businesses use differentplatforms, and they may or may
not be aware of plan hat, theymay or may not be aware of other
platforms that they could use.I'm trying to understand the
value. If I'm sitting in mybusiness now and I'm running at
10 million Arr, or I want togrow to 100 million. Do I need a
certain model that would thenconstitute to look at the
(18:01):
customer first? Do I need to bea certain growth level to look
at the, you know, the startingpoint? Because when we talk and
advise our clients now, there'sa lot of noise in the market at
the moment of rip outSalesforce, implement HubSpot,
and I'm like, Well, why? Well,it's Vogue. So I'm just curious,
because if I'm a user of anotherplatform, like, how do I know
(18:21):
when the flip happens? How do Iknow where I'm going to get the
value as someone that they mightuse that moving forward?
Chris Regester (18:26):
Yeah, and I guess there's, there's many
different answers, right?There's many different scenarios
and situations. I mean, what wesee on the post sales side, we
see a lot of organizations that,you know, if you think I just
the evolution of any company,you know, you one of the first
tools you'll buy as a CRM,right? You always start out in
spreadsheet, and then at somepoint you move to a CRM, and
often that's Pipedrive orHubSpot. And then historically,
(18:47):
the story is when at some pointyou get a Salesforce, and then
at some point you say, oh, youknow what? What about our
customers? What are we doingthere? And they're like, Oh, we
got a CRM, or manage it in in aCRM. So immediately you're like,
Oh, we're going to use the salestool for this other and it's
sort of just like, that's thefirst move. You're like, oh,
it's kind of weird. You're like,Oh, why don't we make the
finance tool team work? Andthey're like, no, no, no, we get
(19:07):
an ERP. But it's like, the set,for some reason the post sales
team, like they're going to workin the sales tool. So there's
that kind of first move that issort of subliminally happened in
many organizations over time.And what we've seen is that 70%
of our new business today isorganizations moving post sale
out of Salesforce and into planhat because, like, it just
doesn't work, you know, if we'rehonest, and I think it doesn't
work for a number of reasons.Like, one, is that, you know,
(19:29):
the transactional data element,it's very hard to have time
series data in Salesforce. Two,you need an you know, typically
at scale, or any form of scale,you need administrators. It
becomes very expensive. Itdoesn't feel modern. And three,
you know, Salesforce clearly hasan issue around usability. It's
very rare that you go out thereand you're like, hey, who loves
Salesforce? And all the AES arelike, Hey, I love Salesforce.
That doesn't happen. And so whatwe're trying to do, the plan
(19:51):
had, is trying to say, look,let's build out a tool that has
sort of enterprise level datamanagement for this data
complexity we talked about with.Consumer grade usability. So one
nice way I think of thinkingabout plant head is, you know,
sort of the data capabilities inSalesforce, or the usability of
a Monday.
Jonny Adams (20:08):
And I really like that explanation inevitably, you
know, it's, there's a lower costof retaining customers, there's
a great return of growingcustomers as well, right? And,
you know, we work so hard toacquire. Well, what platforms
are we really prioritizing toenable? I'm a user of one of
those platforms, as referencedfrom pre sale, and I agree the
(20:29):
functionality is dreadful. And Ithink sometimes my cynical self
goes, Do they just not developthat? Just to really infuriate
me and keep me sort of levellocked in their platform because
I always want more, like, it'sjust, I don't know, maybe that's
just my crazy mind thinkingthere. But it's great to hear
about how plan hack can helpwith one of the most important
(20:49):
aspects and being clientcentric.
Matt Best (20:52):
I think that also, to me, talks to the challenge of
the evolution of CS. And Chris,I'm curious to get your thoughts
here as the value of CS in abusiness and how to demonstrate
that value, and how to quantifythe value, because so often,
again, it's very it's a littlebit perhaps more binary and a
little easier to quantify thatvalue of a sales person by their
success in closing and winningand winning work and where
(21:15):
you've got someone in CS. CS isstill so often seen as a cost
center, which is kind of crazyto Johnny's point of it being at
the heart of retaining yourclimate that you've worked so
hard to get. What does that meanfor not just for plan hat, but
just in your experience? Chris,like, what's your there's not
necessarily a direct questionthere, but I'd love to get your
(21:35):
perspective on CS and where youthink it fits and how you think
it should be seen, and how planthat maybe helps do that.
Chris Regester (21:43):
Yeah, so I think, you know, the first thing
that I would take issue with is,is just like CS, I think that
that is, and it's a terriblelate, totally manufactured
concept, as always, just like,it's also important to just
acknowledge it was like it wasmanufactured. So there was a
company, one of our competitors,nickel gainside, and they're an
amazing marketing machine, butthey manufactured a concept
(22:04):
called customer success becausethey wanted to sell a product to
a group of people. So it's like,it's perfect category creation.
They did an exceptional job.They did such a good job. They
actually wrote a book about itcalled category creation, where
they talked about this. Wecreated the category to sell
seats and build a softwarecompany like and it's just
absolutely the Salesforceplaybook, but done for over
(22:25):
sale. But I think that, like,it's the wrong it's the wrong
framing. This was never acategory. It's not a category.
People have managed theircustomers since the dawn of
time. There's nothing new, youknow, as I always you know, say,
if you went in, you know, what'sthe original recurring revenue?
Business is hairdressing.Because, you know, hair always
grows bad. But if you go into abarber shop in Roman times, like
(22:45):
the barber had to do the samething, right? The barber had to
give a good haircut. Probablygive some gossip, you know,
maybe try and give you the Nero,the narrow perm as an upsell,
and then you'll come back amonth later and get another
chop. And that was the way itworked. It's, this is no
different. It's just like it'scustomer management is what it
is. CS as a concept is, is it abit silly, and it's kind of been
brought up with this sort of,you know, fluffy rainbows and
(23:07):
unicorns, stories and all ofthese, like, weird terms. But
this is, how do you manage yourcustomers over time, you know?
And what do you have to do?Well, you have to deliver
objectives that your customerswant. And if you do so they'll
pay you more money, and thatwill just increase over time.
And this is business 101, youcannot run a successful business
(23:27):
if you are not successfullydelivering objectives to your
customers.
Jonny Adams (23:31):
I completely agree with you. You know, coming from
a pre sales, sales era and salesdirectorship, you know, customer
service was the term that washeard then I came into this
world of customer success. Butin professional services, it's
called Client partners. And whatI'm curious about Chris is
partnerships is a mutuallybeneficial end goal, right? It
has to be a win, win. We talkabout that in a lot of worlds.
(23:54):
It's not about Win, lose orlose, win. So if you had a
choice, you know you referencedCS customer success, probably
not being or come from a certainorigin. But what would you call
it if you had a choice, if youdon't mind me asking.
Chris Regester (24:07):
I would try not to call it anything. But I think
what it is is long term customermanagement. That's what it say.
That's, that's what you'redoing. It's over time. You're,
you're doing these things. But Icouldn't agree more, like I
think the economics of good longterm customer management are
really still not fullyunderstood. And I have a great
anecdote to this, where recentlyI spoke to the CEO and the CRO
(24:29):
of a really famous, publiclylisted NASDAQ company. It's a,
you know, essentially a B to B,household name, and we're
talking to them, and they havea, they clearly have a churn
problem, and it's in all oftheir public statements, they
have a churn problem that's beenimpacting the public valuation
or the market cap of thecompany. And we're talking with
the CRO about this challenge,and the CRO ultimately owns pre
sale and post sale, and we'retalking about the structure of
(24:50):
their sales organization. He'slike, Well, it's built for
velocity. This is built forvelocity. I said, What do you
mean? He's like, Well, we'rehiring young kids. We train them
to sell SMB as they. Succeedwith SMB. They move up the
market, then move mid market,moves up to enterprise, and
that's kind of the path so thatthe entire operating model is
built around acceleration andvelocity in new business. But
the challenge is, is all ofthose deals that those new new
(25:12):
guys are signing, all those SMBdeals, 45% churn, 45% churn, and
this is their vehicle. So youthink about the first impression
of these kids joining thecompany two three years in,
they're in an SMB segment.That's what they're learning.
Sell it, move on, sell it, moveon, sell it, move on. And it's
killing the business. And yousee the net retention of the
company going down with themarket cap. And it's just the
economic model doesn't work ifyou don't rethink your business
(25:35):
around long term customermanagement, long term sort of
healthy, sustainable businesspractices. But this is, you
know, a household name in SAS,and the CRO is like, he is
exceptional, but hisprioritization is, I want to
build a velocity based SalesMachine, rather than a long term
sustainable, you know, post saleorganization. And I thought that
was such a it's such a truism ofwhere many organizations are at
(25:57):
today.
Jonny Adams (25:57):
So the solution to that challenge then, from your
expertise. What is the answer tothat?
Chris Regester (26:03):
Don't sell deals that churn.
Jonny Adams (26:04):
And so there's a lot of work that goes on for
this use case. So not only is aplatform required to help with
that transition of decline togrowth, but there's also a
people and cultural shift thatthat's required. There's also a
capability and skills element.There's a hiring FTE future plan
and this is where it gets supercomplex, but plan hat can inform
(26:26):
an organization of the metrics,right?
Chris Regester (26:29):
Yeah, so I think, you know, plan hat as a
technology, you know, weultimately become the place
where you consolidate all ofyour data so you understand
what's going on with yourcustomers, and where you manage
all of these processes, both preand post sale, so that you can
report and understand theefficacy of what you're doing.
Plan had as a business. We thencome in and also provide a whole
bunch of consulting, advisoryservices around what's the right
(26:51):
methodology to do it. Or we usegreat partners like SVR, you
know, to come in and advise onthese things as well. I think
what you said is really spot on,that this is much more than just
a system. You can't, you know,if someone like, Ah, I will get
a system. It will all work. Itdoesn't. You know, that doesn't
happen anything. You don't sortof buy Salesforce and then sell
more. It doesn't. It doesn'twork that way. But I think that,
(27:11):
you know, you know our topicbeing customer centricity,
that's a cultural thing beforeit's anything else. And it and I
think just, honestly, it's a topdown cultural thing. If you
really want to institute it inyour organization, it doesn't
just happen because people arelike, Hey, I love the customers.
We put customer centric on thewebsite. It's top down and it's
(27:34):
cultural.
Matt Best (27:35):
I think one example you gave there of the household
B to B, clearly, that's anoperating model. That's a sort
of directional challenge, which,as you said, is that is the top
down piece. There's the otherbits that Johnny talked about
there around your training,enablement, coaching. There's
culture as a that could be usedas a bit of a kind of umbrella
term, perhaps, that just sortof, yeah, that encapsulates a
(27:58):
lot of that stuff. I mean, wewould see them typically
challenges around, you know,remuneration and compensation as
being kind of key drivers. Arewe driving all of the right
behaviors? That's a bit more ofthe stick than the carrot. I
think there's for me, and whatI've seen in various businesses
is, and this is linked very muchto the culture, but it's almost
the people armed with or notnecessarily armed, and that's
(28:19):
probably the point, but taskedwith the job of looking after
the clients and growing clientsand how they are seen in the
under the CRO CRO banner, interms of the autonomy that
they're given, the capability toserve in the best possible way.
You know, the the level ofexperience that you're hiring.
I've seen organizations who seeCS as a feeder into sales or
(28:43):
product, and it's sort of partof and it's your will you go
into CS through being a goodsupport technician. So well,
that's, for me, is isfundamentally the wrong way
around, because CS is aboutdeveloping, nurturing the
relationships of those clientsthat define your business. So is
that something that that you'reseeing as well when you're not
necessarily just your clients,but also when you're out in the
(29:04):
market, is that still somethingthat you think, that we're all
sort of working towards?
Chris Regester (29:09):
I think, I mean, I think you're hitting on
something that's very clearly,very clearly a thing I would say
at the top, on the on thecultural level. So, you know,
you talk about, you know, maybeculture is the rapper, and a
good way to reflect on it as anorganization is like, Who are
the HEROES in your company? Andin most companies I've ever
seen, heroes are either theseller who lands the big deal or
(29:29):
it's the engineer who, you know,builds whatever it is the fancy
AI integration. But it'stypically, it's either an
engineer or it's a sales rep,you know, and that sales rep who
closes that deal and, you know,rings the bell or whatever they
do to celebrate, like, oh mygod, you did it. Meanwhile,
there's some CSM who's gonnahave to work that thing every
day for so long and and who getsremunerated off that deal. Is it
(29:51):
the seller who lands it, or isit the CSM who delivers the
continuous value? So I thinkit's a very interesting thing
now. And like, another way oflike, who are the heroes? Is,
what are the stories? Yeah, andthis is something that we talk
to our customers a lot about. Onthe post sale side, is the vast
majority of organizations, youknow, they'll celebrate their
victories in in sales in a bigway, and you communicate their
releases in a big way. Sothey're celebrating engineering,
(30:12):
they're celebrating sales. Butthe great stories that happen
post sale, they don't really getcelebrated. They need to get
communicated that much. Youknow, we got this new customer,
and we onboarded them in recordtime, we just renewed our, you
know, we really discussed them ablah, blah, blah. We, you know,
whatever it may be, people don'ttell those stories and share
those stories a little much soit becomes a little bit of a
self fulfilling prophecy thatculturally, the other areas are
more prominent in the business.I think the recruitment path
(30:36):
into CS or into post sale roleswas for a long time, what you're
saying, it's kind of like weused to joke about it, like, you
know, it's the elephant'sgraveyard. It's, you know, it's
that person that you really likein the company, like, Oh,
they're so likable. They'realready great at anything. No, I
shove them in CS, and I'd saythat that's how it was. I don't
think that's how it is now. I dothink it's changing. And sort of
(30:59):
my theory on this, and mymessage to anyone who better
listen to it, is that your postsale team in the organization
should be the most aggressiveteam you have any organization.
And that's a fairly for manypeople. That's a counter
intuitive pointing no salesshould be aggressive. But I'm
like, no post sale needs to bethe most aggressive part of the
organization, because they'rethe team that needs to say no
(31:20):
more than anyone else. So theyneed to understand they don't
work for the customer. They workfor the customer's objectives.
And so you align on what theobjectives are. And then, like,
Hey, you want to go up thatmountain, let's go. Get behind
me. Let's march up the mountain,or go there. And Midway, the
customer's like, oh, you knowwhat? I want to go over to
there. There's a nice picnicthat's going to have a picnic by
the river. And you're like, No,we're going up the mountain.
That's where we're going getbehind me, we got to go. And so
(31:42):
they've got to have thatassertive, aggressive mindset.
And I think we're seeing thathappen more, and it's a little
bit to do with, you know, postsell teams becoming more
commercial and more ownership ofrevenue, you know, that's
driving that mindset, but also arecognition that you can't just
hire the, you know, thefriendly, smiley, good culture
fit to manage the customers, youneed someone who's strong and
assertive, because managingcustomers sort of, you need to
(32:05):
be able to triangulate between adeep understanding of your
customer, a deep understandingof your product, and a deep
understanding of theirobjectives. And if you can
triangulate between those threethings, then you can deliver
value. And that's, you know,that's not a passive, you know,
happy, smiley, friendly personwho can typically do that.
Jonny Adams (32:24):
I mean, I love that golden nuggets coming out of
that. And one, one of the thingsthat we, you know, when Matt and
I were planning this session wethought would be valuable, is if
you could touch upon that sortof customer centricity and how
to build that strategy into yourbusiness. And I feel that you've
touched upon a real, sort ofimportant factor that I wanted
to amplify for the listeners. Itwas around connecting
(32:45):
aggression. I thought there's aninteresting word you chose, by
the way, you know that's becausethat could be seen in a certain
way. But as you then went on todescribe it was really
interesting about connecting thedots of the customer objectives,
which I think is lost in so manybusinesses. You might think
about what you do, what we do asa professional service firm is
that, I think it comes to themindset shift of thinking about
outcomes first and then comingtowards understanding how you
(33:09):
can support that client, andspecifically, whether you're
working at plan out or SBR, youdo a similar thing, right? But
understanding objectives andoutcomes are really crucial. We
need to understand those of ourclient base and then work
towards those. If you'rethinking about building a
customer centric strategy withinan organization, one of those
things would be understandingyour customers objectives. What
would be some of the otherfacets that make up a really
(33:31):
strong customer centricstrategy?
Chris Regester (33:33):
No, I think that's a great one. So I think
that that's that's got to be,you know, almost the, you know,
top of the tree is understandingcustomer outcomes. But I think
it's a little bit, I would say,maybe bigger than that. So in
the anecdote I gave that SAScompany, they've designed their
operating model around velocity.And I would argue, you know, you
need to design your operatingmodel around customer outcomes.
(33:54):
So for example, you say, well,in marketing, when they're
filling in a lead form on thewebsite, that lead form should
have categorizations to whatthey want to achieve, that
information needs to be therefor sales rep and CRM, so that
they can then have a verydefined narrative around those
things. But it's refined. Thenyou have a kickoff call when
they convert, what are youroutcomes? This is what we
(34:15):
understand. This is how we godeeper in it. And then that's
reviewed every quarter and andsort of you, you build a
framework around objectives thatbecomes a consistent language
and narrative that a prospecthears, a lead hears, and a
customer hears, and they hear acontinuously, no matter who they
talk to in the organization.When they read your newsletter,
they hear the same language.When they look into product,
(34:36):
they see the same language likethat, familiarity around
objectives is very, verypowerful. So that operating
model of a pure alignment movingproduct, you know, what products
building, what marketing istalking about, what sales is
pitching, you know, CS isdelivering. That's, I think, the
core of customer centricity whenyou're thinking about about
objectives. And then, and that'ssort of like a virtualization of
(34:57):
it. And then I think you alsocan think about it horizontally,
where you say. So it also needsto, you need to realize that
it's not just the group ofpeople who are, you know, it's
not just the customer managersor the CSMs, but the once
they're a customer, it's now acollective responsibility, and
that's sort of another piece youhave to operationalize. So does
everybody understand their roleand responsibility towards the
(35:19):
customer, and what they've gotto do, you know, to get the
customer towards theirobjectives, which very often,
you know, isn't, isn't the case.And there's so many interesting
kind of operational tactics youcan bring in to kind of drive that.
Matt Best (35:31):
So Chris, circling back to what you shared earlier,
around how plan hat was wasformed, and the nature in which
you were able to do that throughbootstrapping, but with a
continued focus on value anddelivering value to your
customers. If you're out thereand you don't make necessarily
have that option, right? Maybeyou can't bootstrap it yourself.
How do you stop yourself fromgetting distracted by those
(35:53):
other things that are out therethat might pull you offline and
remain focused on delivering andfocused on value to the customer?
Chris Regester (36:00):
I think it's, to some extent, you know, if you're
not bootstrapping and, you know,say you're, you know,
capitalizing the business withinvestment. You know, at some
point it's just like that'sbecome, you know, the way the
world works. You know, at somepoint, you know, when a VC looks
at your business, theyunderstand that your growth will
slow to the point of your netretention. So if your net
retention is 120% your growthwill become 20% over time. So
(36:21):
the sort of this, like, youknow, we're all intrinsically
motivated to drive growth fromour customers, because
ultimately, that's how peopleare going to value the business.
When you look at, you know, whenyou look at analysis of ARR
growth of a company against NRRof a company, you get a higher
multiple valuation if your nr ishigher, rather than, if your AR
growth is higher, which I thinkis, for a lot of people, isn't
immediately obvious. You sort ofassume, or I got 100% growth,
(36:44):
everyone will value usmassively. But actually, if
you've got 100% growth or 60%net churn, you don't get a good,
a good valuation. So, yeah, Ithink that's, there's a little
bit of, you know, it happensnaturally, and then a little bit
it's just sort of, it's adiscipline that we're all
learning, I would argue thatmost, or many, many companies
have been about built withoutthat, and you can, of course,
survive for a very long time byjust focusing on new business.
(37:06):
You know that, you know, we'veall, you know, been in companies
that have done that. You can dothat, but like this, you know,
SaaS, company I mentioned, youknow, they did incredibly well.
That's why we all know theirname. But now it's not
sustainable, so I think that hasto be its recognition, like, at
some point you need to figurethis out. So it makes a lot of
sense to do it early on. And oneof the things that I'm seeing
(37:26):
now, which I think is reallyinteresting, is what a couple of
things. So one is that morestartups are thinking about post
sale and customer life cyclesearlier on than they were
before. That's very, very clear,right? It used to be these sort
of think about, how do we builda product and sell it and then
product and sell it? And then,you know, it'll be a perfect
product. Life will be good. Butinstead, now we're seeing more
people think like that, and morepeople building it into the
(37:49):
product. Which is where I thinkthis will all go in a couple of
years, is that products willhold the objective and, you
know, everything will be, youknow, you productize customer
management, which makes a lot ofsense over time.
Matt Best (38:00):
That's really interesting, the concept of
productizing, customermanagement, and I guess there's
that on that journey working outwhere to point your resource in
the in the most appropriate wayto maintain and develop and grow
those relationships. If you'resat listening to this podcast
now, and you're a businessthat's starting to see an
increase in churn, let's sayyou're a software business,
you're starting to see anincrease in churn. You're not
(38:21):
really sure where it's comingfrom. You've got an established
customer success team. You'vegot a healthy pipeline of new
business. Where would you advisesomeone in that position to go
look first?
Chris Regester (38:32):
So I think the foundation to a lot of these
things, it's hard, and thehardest thing about per sale is
it is different for everyorganization. It's just like the
moment anyone starts talking ingeneric language around post
sale. There's no point inlistening anymore, because it
is. It's just different. Are youselling to enterprise, selling
to SMB? Is it a verticallyintegrated What are you selling
(38:55):
like? There's so many things toit, but there's clearly
something around you. Need toidentify cohorts in your
customers, and you need to lookat cohorts by multiple different
dimensions. So look at cohortsby size. What's their spend with
you? What's that potentialspend? By geography? Look at the
year of sale, productconstellation, all of those
things you need to look atcohorts see if you can isolate
(39:17):
problematic cohorts and positivecohorts is clearly a thing.
There you go. Look at lifecycle. You know you want to
have, at all times, arudimentary life cycle. And you
want to have some sort of kindof North Star indicators of
outcome success or outcomeachievement. Some people talk
about that as a health score. Ithink that you know health
scoring, so some good things tothem, some silly things to them.
(39:40):
But you need some sort of NorthStars of, is there, you know,
are we? Are we achievingoutcomes with our customers?
They seem to be the foundationso segmenting, thinking through
a life cycle, ensuring that it'sbeing executed, and then having
some sort of, you know, guidingmetrics around outcome
achievement, they're thefoundational pieces we always
you know, try and coach people towards.
Matt Best (40:01):
Fantastic. And Jonny and I both kind of nodding along
there. I think we would, wewould absolutely concur with
that. I've got one finalquestion for you, and this might
be a tricky one, but obviously,at plan hat, you use plan hat,
right? What of the features, ifyou had to pick two features,
would you say that your teamappreciate most from the product?
Chris Regester (40:22):
We did a new thing recently, which I thought
was interesting and a goodexample. So I think when you
have an organization, whetherit's you know, a sale, whatever
team it is, like you, one thingthat is becoming clearer and
clearer is like, you need to bemeasuring how people are
spending their time at scale,not not at a micromanagement
level, but on the post salepoint side, that could be things
like, maybe you institute a newidea of like, we're going to
(40:43):
start doing ebrs. EBR makessense. We're going to do
executive business reviews ofour customers. Sounds logical.
We should do it. But then ifyou're going to institute that,
you're going to spend all thistime setting them up and
building them out, then you'vegot to measure what actually
changes as a result of doingthem. And I think a lot of
people don't do that. They'rejust like, let's start doing
this thing intuitively. Itsounds like it makes sense, and
(41:05):
then six months later, like,hey, was it worth it? We've
spent 1000 hours on that thing,and you don't know. So one of
the interesting things that planhad is that it's very flexible
data model, so you can reallymeasure absolutely anything
against any other data point. Soone thing we did recently was we
launched a whole bunch of newsequences to our customers. And
so these are really to driveeducation and adoption of our
users. And what we did is wedecided we were going to AB test
(41:27):
it. So we built out all thesesequences, you know, informing
people about ways to use the,you know, the product and
whatnot. But we sent to our SMBcustomers, our mid market
customers, we purposely didn'tto the enterprise. And then, you
know, we sent this out a bunchbased on various triggers in the
system, and then in June, wewere able to do analysis on it,
and we saw that users in the SMBand a mid market cohort who'd
been receiving these sequences,their adoption of 65% higher
(41:50):
than users in the enterprisecustomers who not been receiving
these sequences, despite allbeing kind of new users within
the same period of time. Sothere's huge rally for our team
and for our customers around theability to kind of one, you
know, push this stuff out andengage with all of your users
automatically. You know, we'reengaging with all these users
our team is managing, you know,without having to do anything,
but to really, really evidencethe impact of it, which was,
(42:12):
which was really powerful. Ithink another thing that our
team likes a lot, and a lot ofour customers use as well as we
have this concept ofcollaborative portals, where you
could take absolutely any of thedata in plan had, and you can
share it in real time with yourcustomer. If you imagine you're
an organization who's got 10,000customers, and you know, as the
kind of Pareto law 8020 thinggoing on. It's got these 8000
customers, they generate 20% ofrevenue. It's not, you know,
(42:35):
they're important, but not soimportant. But you still want to
give them a really nice a reallynice experience. So what you can
do plan hat is you could autogenerate dashboards showing
their usage, or auto generatepresentations around their usage
and their objectives, becauseyou got all of that data in plan
hat, and automatically share itin this portal. So then they
have this destination they cango to, and they're seeing, over
(42:55):
time, how their usage isimproving, and they're seeing
the ROI. So even though you as ateam aren't spending all the
time doing it, the customer isstill seeing the transparency in
the ROI and that it's alignedwith their objectives. So we use
them really heavily and so on.And then there's one, one thing
that we're doing now, which Ithink is, I think is actually a
really interesting concept,where in these portals, a
customer can go in and updateinformation there, and that
(43:17):
information, if they update it,that can update back into plan
head. So if you imagine, youknow, generally in post sale,
the way people have thought islike we as a company, as a
vendor, we need to choose thekind of content we're going to
send to our customers, becausewe are smart. We know what they
want. We know that a user withlow adoption, they need this
content, they need that content,and so on. But now the customers
can go into a portal. They canselect it. So it's like, when
(43:39):
you're a kid and you have those,you know, choose your own
adventure novels, and, you know,you roll the dice, and then it's
like, in the corner there's atreasure chest. In the other
corner there's an old lady, andyou're like, you know, you go to
the old lady and she turns intoa gremlin, or whatever happens,
like those, those kind of funbooks. But it's kind of like
that now, because in the portal,the customer could be like, you
(44:00):
know, you can ask in a portal,what are your objectives? The
customer selects two, and thatautomatically drops them into
sequences that start to educatethem around how to use your
technology to achieve thoseobjectives. So it's like a
choose your own adventure, butsort of reversed customer
management, which I think is avery interesting thing. It comes
back to what we said a momentago about productizing customer management.
Matt Best (44:19):
Chris, you said it goes back to productizing
customer management. That's realsort of demonstration of of how
that comes to light. I think onething that really jumps out to
me, and if I go back a number ofyears, back to when I was a CS
or a cam managementpractitioner, and you think if
you could have any wish, itwould be to automate some of the
management of some of yoursmaller customers, and to
(44:40):
provide you with relevantinsight at the right time, so
that you can be relevant to yourcustomer. And I think actually
what you've just articulatedthere, for me feels like exactly
that. It's like, how do we takeyou know, and that's for me, is
the sort of the fundamentals ofgood customer management, is
understanding your customer,understanding. You provide value
to your customer and making surethat you help them in seeing
(45:02):
that but also getting it. And Ithink actually those features
that you just articulated, Ithink, really enable that.
Chris, thank you so much forjoining us today. It's been a
fantastic discussion aboutclient centricity, and it's so
great to hear how plan hats outthere helping some of those
client managers or CSMs oraccount managers, or whatever we
want to call them, to really dothe very best job, to continue
(45:24):
to deliver value for theircustomer. And I think just
client centricity at the heartof growth is what we wanted to
talk about today. And I thinkactually, if we circle back to
that, what we've explored aresome really, really great ways
in which to do that. And Chris,you shared some fantastic
insight with our audience. So onbehalf of Jonny and I would like
to thank you so much for joiningus on the Growth Workshop Podcast.
Chris Regester (45:46):
Thank you for having me.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with
(00:02):
myself, Matt Best and my cohost, Jonny Adams.
Jonny Adams (00:05):
Hello.
Matt Best (00:06):
Hi Jonny. And today we are joined by the fantastic
Chris Regester. And Chris is oneof the founding members and
current CCO of plan hat. Planhat are a customer platform
built to acquire service andgrow lifelong customers. Chris
is also a wealth of experiencein growing and developing SaaS
software organizations over hisillustrious career so far. So
(00:28):
Chris, thank you for joining us.It's fantastic to see you. I
know SBR and plan have beenpartners now for some time, and
we talk a lot about customersuccess, or as it's often known,
CS for short, and what would bea fascinating place to start
today's conversation. Just talkto our listeners a little bit
about where things started outfor you and how your journey
(00:49):
began.
Chris Regester (00:50):
I started my career at a great company called
meltwater, which at the time waslike 40 people. They were just
launching in the UK. It was likea PR tech company, very small.
They'd come out of Norway. I waslaunching in UK, joined there in
a sales and account managementsales and CS role, and then very
quickly moved and opened up thebusiness in Asia Pacific. So
(01:11):
they wanted to grow very quicklyinternationally. They took a
team to the US. They took a teamof two to Hong Kong. I turned 23
the day I moved about a monthafter I moved to Hong Kong,
moved over and started buildingup the business, and spent best
part of seven years over there.So running sales, CS,
recruitment, strategy,marketing, everything, building
up the business. Built intoabout 25 million. We opened in
(01:34):
Australia, we opened in Tokyo.We opened in Beijing, Shanghai,
Guadalupe, Delhi, Singapore.Hire people in those locations,
bring them at the Hong Kongincubate and then open up the
office. So then ran that, ranthat region, which was a great
big adventure. And then by thestage, meltwater was about 100
100 and 20 million AR globally,and it had grown very quickly in
(01:55):
all these disparate markets. Andthey wanted to start up a
revenue operations function. Iwas asked to take that on. And
the idea was to kind of herd thecats and bring the madness back
and try and build some sort of,you know, central processes and
central strategy andconnectivity between all of the
disparate offices around theworld. So I moved back to
London. This is where my firstdaughter was born, and then
moved into a rev ops role. Andthat was kind of the journey
(02:16):
from about 100 million, 120million, to about 450 so this
big exciting thing. Did lots ofacquisitions, and I was in the
rev ops role, ultimately tookthe company public. Big, big,
big adventure.
Matt Best (02:26):
That is quite the journey, and the international
element there as well, right? Sofascinating to experience all
those different cultures,especially as you're building
something new. That must havebeen really interesting.
Chris Regester (02:35):
I can't underestimate how important
getting internationalexperiences in a career. At one
point, I also ran our SanFrancisco office for a little
while as well in the middle ofthat thing. So got some us
experience too. But working andbuilding out Asia Pacific was
just so enjoyable, just so manyfun experiences. You know, how
do you hire an office in Delhi?If you've never been to Delhi
(02:56):
before? For example, there wasjust so many we ended up with an
office in an art gallery in ashopping mall, which was
fantastic and quirky, but alsostrange. When everyone's
working, sat on the phonetalking to customers, and, you
know, mums are pushing, youknow, prams past the office
window. So lots of excitingadventures along the way.
Jonny Adams (03:11):
Chris, it's lovely to have you on and even hearing
the story there is, isfantastic. What was fascinating
about your story there wasaround the journey that you've
been on, you know, withoutputting you on the spot too
much, what's the one standoutthing that's enabled you to
continue to grow? You know, fromlessons learned, if you think
back to that time where youstarted, you know, what's that
one thing that's really helpedyou to continue to grow?
Chris Regester (03:33):
It's a hard one. One genuine lesson that I
learned from the founder and theCEO of meltwater, which I think
is just like a it's a beautifultruth, and it's something that
just makes so much sense. Hejust said, like, talent is
talent. Doesn't matter where youare, doesn't matter what your
experience is. Talent is talent.And so you just have, you have
your eyes open talent. Like, ofcourse, you can't build a career
on your own. You have to buildit with the people around you.
So just look for talent. Thatwas what we found building in
(03:56):
Asia Pacific, sort of how Iworked in the US. Talent is
talent. You just got to find theright pockets of it.
Matt Best (04:01):
And that's fantastic. And a recent guest on this
podcast, we were talking aboutemployee satisfaction being the
forerunner to clientsatisfaction. And I think you
know, talking about focus ontalent, focus on people, and
seeing that as your key leverageand your key opportunity for
growth is, I don't think manynaturally think like that. And I
think that's a reallyfascinating bit of insight. And
we really want to dive into thisconcept of client centricity
(04:23):
with you today. But as iscustomary on the podcast, and
just before we get into the meatof things, we'd love to hear
something that was particularlyinteresting in your week.
Chris Regester (04:32):
Okay, well, recently, I had the good
opportunity to go to theOlympics, which was, I think,
just phenomenal. And there areso many elements to it that were
that were fascinating. I saw theBritish gymnast Briony Park win
the gymnastic trampolining,which was extraordinary. If this
whole software thing doesn'twork out, I'll probably go off
the gymnastic trampolining next.But the most entertaining part
(04:54):
of it for me was we went out tothe north of Paris and went to
this hockey match. And I'd say,you know, guarantee them. I. She
played a lot of field hockeygrowing up, I'd say the vast
majority people in the audiencehad never seen a hockey match
before them. Suddenly, thepeople sat around me had never
seen a hockey match before intheir life, but it was France
versus South Africa, and theamount of passion and love that
(05:16):
was shown during that match wasjust amazing. The I'd say that
the hour and a half of thematch, it was the most important
thing in everyone's life. Andjust seeing all these French
people, who, you know, everyoneknew before the Olympics had
been very cynical and skepticalabout popping planning in a
totally Parisian way. I can saythis because my family's part
French, but they, you know, veryreason they've been, you know,
complaining. Oh, so it's beensaid, I'm going to leave and go
(05:36):
to the south of France and getout. But then they were there,
and in the moment, they wereabsolutely belting out the
Marseilles. They were just belt.It was just phenomenal. Just
endless, endless chanting ofAiles. But then also, like, you
know, what is this sport? Howdoes it work? It was so much
fun.
Matt Best (05:51):
Love that energy, right? And it just get, getting
energy from, from places, so wedon't necessarily expect it. And
I mean, I know I didn't get achance to go in person, but just
even hearing it on the TV, itwas, you could, you could almost
sort of feel the power comingthrough. And as a rugby fan,
I've had many experience in thestad de France listening to that
being chanted in my ear. Yeah,they really get behind their
(06:12):
team. It's fantastic to hearthat support.
Chris Regester (06:14):
So much passion.
Matt Best (06:16):
It's fantastic. Wonderful, Jonny. What about
you? Can you live up to thathigh standard?
Jonny Adams (06:21):
No, I can't, because it does draw me back to
then the 2012 Olympics inLondon, I have to say, when I
was fortunate enough to go. AndI think one of the things that
spun out for me is I wasfascinated by the weird and the
wonderful events that went on inthe Olympics at that time. So
yeah, brilliant for you talkingabout that, Chris, and thanks
for sharing the story. For me.You know, it's been a bit of a
(06:41):
realization we're about to haveour first baby, slightly
nervous, panicking. What we'retrying to do is we're trying to
train our one year old Spaniel,and he's a working car Spaniel,
so they have high levels ofenergy. And what I'm coming to
realize after the third trainingsession with this trainer is
that it's not the dog that'sbeing trained, it's definitely
me, and then you can see theimprovement from session one
(07:04):
session two, or the lack ofimprovement. And I feel that
from the outcome of that, I'mabout to go on a journey that's
going to change my whole world.From being a parent. I'm a dog
parent at the moment, I'm goingto be a human parent soon, and
I've really got to recognizethat a lot of this is going to
be driven from good parentalleadership, good awareness, good
understanding, and I'm dreadfulwith the dog, so I better pick
(07:25):
up my quality with my new childthat will be arriving, but I
can't wait to be a dad. Matt,what about you?
Matt Best (07:32):
It's funny how we seek inspiration in some of the
strangest places. But I've had areflection of my own. Over the
last couple of weeks, I've beenback out on my bike a little
bit, which has been really goodand really energizing. But for
once, I've stuck with it for asort of for a period of time. So
rather than doing one ride andthen giving up for another three
weeks and then going back anddoing it, I've done sort of back
(07:52):
to back, fairly decent bikerides recently. And something I
noticed, if we think about thisin the context of growth and
sales, is how the power of, kindof sticking with it and then
tracking your progress. So I'veclimbed the same hill three
weekends on the bounce, and thefriend that I go riding with
shared the Strava link and thePB that we achieved last week.
And you just think that's thatthose little wins, right? It's a
(08:13):
small goal, but these juststepping stones that gives you
that motivation and that driveto go forward. So yeah, that's
what I was celebrating in thispast week. Awesome. So Chris,
diving into your experience andthe insight that you could share
with this audience, when itcomes to kind of client
centricity, we talk a lot atclients about client centricity
with our clients, but also forourselves. And I think I see
(08:35):
that the importance of having aclient centric approach. And
obviously plan hat is reallybuilt around that, and the plan
hat CRM software is built aroundthat client centric approach,
and it's perhaps unique focus inperspective of the customer,
rather than perhaps coming at itfrom a sales or marketing
pipeline perspective. So how hasthis client centric approach
(08:56):
shaped the development andgrowth of plan hat in your eyes?
And how do you ensure that thatkind of permeates throughout
every level of the organization?
Chris Regester (09:05):
That's a good question, you know. So context,
so plan head is about 200 peoplearound the world where, you
know, we refer to Plan head as acustomer platform. You know, we
sell a CRM software, a CSPsoftware and a professional
service software. And you know,the idea is that people can
manage the entire lifecycle andcustomer within plan had, but as
you rightly said, We rightlysaid, we've come at it from a
post sale point of view. So wesaid, if you look at, you know,
(09:26):
traditional CRMs today. SoSalesforce, your HubSpot,
they're already built pre sale.So HubSpot starts life as a
marketing tool. Salesforcestarts life as sales automation,
sales pipeline in that juststarts life focusing on post
sale. And our rationale there isthat post sale is just
inherently more complicated,more data. The data is time
(09:47):
series. There's more activities.The activities are more complex,
and it's more cross functional,and it's inherently you're
trying to build a morecomplicated and solve a more
complicated set of problems.Then you are pre sale. So it was
felt that it was very natural tostart post sale, solve the
complex problems, architectaround complexity, and then
(10:08):
bring that and add in the presale components. It's wrong,
which is what we've, you know,which is what we've now done.
But in doing so, we bootstrappedthe business for a very, very
long time. So, you know, when westarted the company, handful of
people and we said, Look, we'renot going to have any commercial
team members. We're not going todo any marketing. I'm going to
have any sellers. We're justgoing to have people who are
(10:30):
trying to figure out what thisset of problems are that we're
trying to solve and the rightway of going about it. So for
the first four or five years,totally bootstrapped. No, not
really a salary insight. And arereally building this out,
thinking very hard till we hadabout 100 employees, which is a
lot for bootstrapping. And youknow, then it gets pretty scary
as well, because when youbootstrapping, you typically
only have three months of salaryin the bank account, and you're
(10:52):
always a little bit nervous. Youhave a bad quarter, and suddenly
it all goes a little bitsideways. But then we did a very
large Series A, and we raised$50 million series A but because
we've been bootstrapped, it'svery much in our DNA that
anything you do has to generatevalue, and you don't just spend
unnecessarily. So even today,we've barely touched that 50
million because, you know, ourculture is to run the business
(11:14):
profitably and ensure thateverything is focused around
value, value creation of everyindividual. There's no fluffy
roles, there's no flappy work.It's value. And when you have
that mindset, you realize thatat the end of the day, the
reason you exist is to deliverobjectives for your customers.
Because as you build a businessvery quickly, all of your
(11:35):
revenue, all of your inherentvalue as a business, is in your
customer base. It's not in yournew business pipeline that's all
hopes and dreams and forecasts,but the actual business is in
your customers. And so as youscale a business, what matters
is, can you deliver objectivesto your customers, and over
time, can you retain and growthem? So I think that bootstrap
nature of the business justinherently makes you value
(11:56):
customers so much more. Youknow, if you have an idea and
you know, someone gives you 200grand, and then you, you know,
you get a kind of a proofconcept idea, and you turn that,
you get 2 million in seedfunding, then all you care about
is churning out that pipelineand proving that you're going to
land new customers. But ifyou're having to fund the
business yourself, you realize,like, No, we need the customers
to renew. We need them to grow,because that's how we're going
(12:18):
to make payroll. So it's verymuch in our DNA to focus on
customer centricity and customervalue, because otherwise the
business would have fallen apartvery early on.
Jonny Adams (12:27):
That's a great set of statements that have lots of
value within themselves, and Ican make some assumptions on one
of the points you made earlieraround complexities from
onboarding onwards, just for thelisteners. Could you just
describe a couple of examples ofthe complexities.
Chris Regester (12:43):
Yes, I think that if you, if you transplant,
it's like there's morecomplexity and data. So
traditional CRF systems alreadybuilt around transactional data,
right? So an opportunity can beopen or closed, deals can be won
or lost, like typically, thingsexist in a binary state, and
that's how things are. So youlook at HubSpot data or
Salesforce data, everything'svery binary, but when you're
(13:05):
dealing post sale, what mattersis time series data. So that
just means it's more complexdata, and it's just, you know,
just infinitely faster amountsof data you got to think about
because ultimately, post sale isabout understanding current
state, comparing it to priorstate, and thereby inferring
future state. And you're tryingto do this across everything,
right? So all your data has tobe on a time series you can
(13:27):
understand development. Sothere's just vast amounts of
data, and you need that timeseries in all of your product
analytics and ticket volumes andemail threads, in survey
results, in product feedback,and you name it. Every concept,
even revenue, ultimately, istime series, right? What are
they spending with you overtime, and is it increasing or
decreasing? So there is a sortof inherent nature of time
series in modern recurringrevenue businesses and many
(13:50):
other types of business. Andthen there's also this process
complexity, where, if youimagine a marketing and a sales
funnel, it's a relatively linearset of processes. You develop
pipeline, top of funnel, then atsome point, you know, BDR gets
engaged, they hand it over to anAE, or whatever your model is,
and ultimately it closes. Andwhether that's, you know, with a
(14:10):
human or as automated as onecompany versus another, but once
they're a customer, there's somany things you got to think
about. So how do you onboardthem? Are you onboarding the
company or the different users?How do you ensure there's
adoption? What about changemanagement from prior systems?
You know? What about when youhave any product rollout, you
got to do it all again. What doyou do around renewal? What's
your renewal strategy? How doyou do stakeholder management?
(14:32):
Every company ultimately movesup market at some point, like
there's just so much, there's somany more processes, and they're
more complex, and critically,they go on forever, right? They
go on free. It doesn't stop itlike, oh, close one. Let's move
on. It goes on forever. So it'sjust inherently more complexity,
both on data and process.
Jonny Adams (14:50):
And you know, thank you for the explanation. It
resonates, you know, you look atthe buyer complexity, so the pre
sale piece and how thosesquiggly lines can sometimes not
make. That linear approach aswell. But what you've just
described there feels like theif you were to draw that image
out as you described, it wouldbe a really complex set of
processes and lines allconverging and moving away from
(15:11):
each other at points. So thatwas really, really helpful.
Matt Best (15:14):
I think the interesting thing for me here as
well Chris is the and comingfrom a sort of CS background
myself, I think there's all ofthat complexity that exists
within the team in terms ofprocess and the journey that the
overall additional customerjourney complexity. The other
thing is the various differentintegration requirements. And I
think, like that's such a hugepart of it. It's always sort of
(15:35):
liken this to my experience inthe the trading world. And if
you have a front end tradingplatform. I like a Bloomberg or
whatever, that define what itis, because everybody starts
there, right? It's the first,it's the it's the point of
contact for the end user. So thetrader is originates the
activity, and they originate itin that platform. Therefore that
platform dictates downstream,and it's those middle and back
(15:57):
office systems that have to doall of the joining together, and
the seller tape and the glue andthe staples that that knits it
all together. And I guess that'swhere, again, plan hat and where
it's originated with thisclient. First is going to have
that complexity of right? Weneed to take from a billing
system. We need to take we needto pull from a IT Service
Management System. We need topull from the product itself,
(16:18):
because we need to understandwhat that usage looks like, and
that extra layer of complexitythere in implementation causes
more challenges, but it's socritical as a CSM having all of
that in a single pane of glassview in order to serve the
customer most effectively.
Chris Regester (16:33):
Yeah, I think that's so interesting when you
think about kind of enterprisesoftware, and you know,
ultimately, near respect to aplan out what you care about is,
yeah, how sticky is yourproduct? And one of the key
things is, just like you sayit's like you need to be, you
know, if you're a point of dataentry, you're just inherently
more sticky than if you're justa data recipient, and so you
always want to be a point ofdata and just like typically
ticketing tools, you know, theticket is created there. It's
(16:55):
sticky in, in the stack.Likewise, the new business CRM
on the on the post sale side. Ofcourse, you know, you know, CSMs
account managers are workingwith their customers all the
time, so there's data entry tothat level. But in general, in
many organizations post sale,there's just not been as
influential as the salesorganization or the support
organization. So it's lesssticky. I think you're totally
right. But for plan head, yeah,the extensibility, native
(17:17):
integration. So we have sort ofthis vast library of native bi
directional, no codeintegration. So the idea being
that you could quickly connectdata, then organize it, and that
starts to give you the power ofthe organization. If you're on
the post sale side, there'salso, you know, firmographic
data and enrichment you need onthe pre sale side, it's kind of
the same story, right? You'vealways got to bring data
(17:37):
together.
Jonny Adams (17:38):
I'm going to challenge the, you know the
notion businesses use differentplatforms, and they may or may
not be aware of plan hat, theymay or may not be aware of other
platforms that they could use.I'm trying to understand the
value. If I'm sitting in mybusiness now and I'm running at
10 million Arr, or I want togrow to 100 million. Do I need a
certain model that would thenconstitute to look at the
(18:01):
customer first? Do I need to bea certain growth level to look
at the, you know, the startingpoint? Because when we talk and
advise our clients now, there'sa lot of noise in the market at
the moment of rip outSalesforce, implement HubSpot,
and I'm like, Well, why? Well,it's Vogue. So I'm just curious,
because if I'm a user of anotherplatform, like, how do I know
(18:21):
when the flip happens? How do Iknow where I'm going to get the
value as someone that they mightuse that moving forward?
Chris Regester (18:26):
Yeah, and I guess there's, there's many
different answers, right?There's many different scenarios
and situations. I mean, what wesee on the post sales side, we
see a lot of organizations that,you know, if you think I just
the evolution of any company,you know, you one of the first
tools you'll buy as a CRM,right? You always start out in
spreadsheet, and then at somepoint you move to a CRM, and
often that's Pipedrive orHubSpot. And then historically,
(18:47):
the story is when at some pointyou get a Salesforce, and then
at some point you say, oh, youknow what? What about our
customers? What are we doingthere? And they're like, Oh, we
got a CRM, or manage it in in aCRM. So immediately you're like,
Oh, we're going to use the salestool for this other and it's
sort of just like, that's thefirst move. You're like, oh,
it's kind of weird. You're like,Oh, why don't we make the
finance tool team work? Andthey're like, no, no, no, we get
(19:07):
an ERP. But it's like, the set,for some reason the post sales
team, like they're going to workin the sales tool. So there's
that kind of first move that issort of subliminally happened in
many organizations over time.And what we've seen is that 70%
of our new business today isorganizations moving post sale
out of Salesforce and into planhat because, like, it just
doesn't work, you know, if we'rehonest, and I think it doesn't
work for a number of reasons.Like, one, is that, you know,
(19:29):
the transactional data element,it's very hard to have time
series data in Salesforce. Two,you need an you know, typically
at scale, or any form of scale,you need administrators. It
becomes very expensive. Itdoesn't feel modern. And three,
you know, Salesforce clearly hasan issue around usability. It's
very rare that you go out thereand you're like, hey, who loves
Salesforce? And all the AES arelike, Hey, I love Salesforce.
That doesn't happen. And so whatwe're trying to do, the plan
(19:51):
had, is trying to say, look,let's build out a tool that has
sort of enterprise level datamanagement for this data
complexity we talked about with.Consumer grade usability. So one
nice way I think of thinkingabout plant head is, you know,
sort of the data capabilities inSalesforce, or the usability of
a Monday.
Jonny Adams (20:08):
And I really like that explanation inevitably, you
know, it's, there's a lower costof retaining customers, there's
a great return of growingcustomers as well, right? And,
you know, we work so hard toacquire. Well, what platforms
are we really prioritizing toenable? I'm a user of one of
those platforms, as referencedfrom pre sale, and I agree the
(20:29):
functionality is dreadful. And Ithink sometimes my cynical self
goes, Do they just not developthat? Just to really infuriate
me and keep me sort of levellocked in their platform because
I always want more, like, it'sjust, I don't know, maybe that's
just my crazy mind thinkingthere. But it's great to hear
about how plan hack can helpwith one of the most important
(20:49):
aspects and being clientcentric.
Matt Best (20:52):
I think that also, to me, talks to the challenge of
the evolution of CS. And Chris,I'm curious to get your thoughts
here as the value of CS in abusiness and how to demonstrate
that value, and how to quantifythe value, because so often,
again, it's very it's a littlebit perhaps more binary and a
little easier to quantify thatvalue of a sales person by their
success in closing and winningand winning work and where
(21:15):
you've got someone in CS. CS isstill so often seen as a cost
center, which is kind of crazyto Johnny's point of it being at
the heart of retaining yourclimate that you've worked so
hard to get. What does that meanfor not just for plan hat, but
just in your experience? Chris,like, what's your there's not
necessarily a direct questionthere, but I'd love to get your
(21:35):
perspective on CS and where youthink it fits and how you think
it should be seen, and how planthat maybe helps do that.
Chris Regester (21:43):
Yeah, so I think, you know, the first thing
that I would take issue with is,is just like CS, I think that
that is, and it's a terriblelate, totally manufactured
concept, as always, just like,it's also important to just
acknowledge it was like it wasmanufactured. So there was a
company, one of our competitors,nickel gainside, and they're an
amazing marketing machine, butthey manufactured a concept
(22:04):
called customer success becausethey wanted to sell a product to
a group of people. So it's like,it's perfect category creation.
They did an exceptional job.They did such a good job. They
actually wrote a book about itcalled category creation, where
they talked about this. Wecreated the category to sell
seats and build a softwarecompany like and it's just
absolutely the Salesforceplaybook, but done for over
(22:25):
sale. But I think that, like,it's the wrong it's the wrong
framing. This was never acategory. It's not a category.
People have managed theircustomers since the dawn of
time. There's nothing new, youknow, as I always you know, say,
if you went in, you know, what'sthe original recurring revenue?
Business is hairdressing.Because, you know, hair always
grows bad. But if you go into abarber shop in Roman times, like
(22:45):
the barber had to do the samething, right? The barber had to
give a good haircut. Probablygive some gossip, you know,
maybe try and give you the Nero,the narrow perm as an upsell,
and then you'll come back amonth later and get another
chop. And that was the way itworked. It's, this is no
different. It's just like it'scustomer management is what it
is. CS as a concept is, is it abit silly, and it's kind of been
brought up with this sort of,you know, fluffy rainbows and
(23:07):
unicorns, stories and all ofthese, like, weird terms. But
this is, how do you manage yourcustomers over time, you know?
And what do you have to do?Well, you have to deliver
objectives that your customerswant. And if you do so they'll
pay you more money, and thatwill just increase over time.
And this is business 101, youcannot run a successful business
(23:27):
if you are not successfullydelivering objectives to your
customers.
Jonny Adams (23:31):
I completely agree with you. You know, coming from
a pre sales, sales era and salesdirectorship, you know, customer
service was the term that washeard then I came into this
world of customer success. Butin professional services, it's
called Client partners. And whatI'm curious about Chris is
partnerships is a mutuallybeneficial end goal, right? It
has to be a win, win. We talkabout that in a lot of worlds.
(23:54):
It's not about Win, lose orlose, win. So if you had a
choice, you know you referencedCS customer success, probably
not being or come from a certainorigin. But what would you call
it if you had a choice, if youdon't mind me asking.
Chris Regester (24:07):
I would try not to call it anything. But I think
what it is is long term customermanagement. That's what it say.
That's, that's what you'redoing. It's over time. You're,
you're doing these things. But Icouldn't agree more, like I
think the economics of good longterm customer management are
really still not fullyunderstood. And I have a great
anecdote to this, where recentlyI spoke to the CEO and the CRO
(24:29):
of a really famous, publiclylisted NASDAQ company. It's a,
you know, essentially a B to B,household name, and we're
talking to them, and they havea, they clearly have a churn
problem, and it's in all oftheir public statements, they
have a churn problem that's beenimpacting the public valuation
or the market cap of thecompany. And we're talking with
the CRO about this challenge,and the CRO ultimately owns pre
sale and post sale, and we'retalking about the structure of
(24:50):
their sales organization. He'slike, Well, it's built for
velocity. This is built forvelocity. I said, What do you
mean? He's like, Well, we'rehiring young kids. We train them
to sell SMB as they. Succeedwith SMB. They move up the
market, then move mid market,moves up to enterprise, and
that's kind of the path so thatthe entire operating model is
built around acceleration andvelocity in new business. But
the challenge is, is all ofthose deals that those new new
(25:12):
guys are signing, all those SMBdeals, 45% churn, 45% churn, and
this is their vehicle. So youthink about the first impression
of these kids joining thecompany two three years in,
they're in an SMB segment.That's what they're learning.
Sell it, move on, sell it, moveon, sell it, move on. And it's
killing the business. And yousee the net retention of the
company going down with themarket cap. And it's just the
economic model doesn't work ifyou don't rethink your business
(25:35):
around long term customermanagement, long term sort of
healthy, sustainable businesspractices. But this is, you
know, a household name in SAS,and the CRO is like, he is
exceptional, but hisprioritization is, I want to
build a velocity based SalesMachine, rather than a long term
sustainable, you know, post saleorganization. And I thought that
was such a it's such a truism ofwhere many organizations are at
(25:57):
today.
Jonny Adams (25:57):
So the solution to that challenge then, from your
expertise. What is the answer tothat?
Chris Regester (26:03):
Don't sell deals that churn.
Jonny Adams (26:04):
And so there's a lot of work that goes on for
this use case. So not only is aplatform required to help with
that transition of decline togrowth, but there's also a
people and cultural shift thatthat's required. There's also a
capability and skills element.There's a hiring FTE future plan
and this is where it gets supercomplex, but plan hat can inform
(26:26):
an organization of the metrics,right?
Chris Regester (26:29):
Yeah, so I think, you know, plan hat as a
technology, you know, weultimately become the place
where you consolidate all ofyour data so you understand
what's going on with yourcustomers, and where you manage
all of these processes, both preand post sale, so that you can
report and understand theefficacy of what you're doing.
Plan had as a business. We thencome in and also provide a whole
bunch of consulting, advisoryservices around what's the right
(26:51):
methodology to do it. Or we usegreat partners like SVR, you
know, to come in and advise onthese things as well. I think
what you said is really spot on,that this is much more than just
a system. You can't, you know,if someone like, Ah, I will get
a system. It will all work. Itdoesn't. You know, that doesn't
happen anything. You don't sortof buy Salesforce and then sell
more. It doesn't. It doesn'twork that way. But I think that,
(27:11):
you know, you know our topicbeing customer centricity,
that's a cultural thing beforeit's anything else. And it and I
think just, honestly, it's a topdown cultural thing. If you
really want to institute it inyour organization, it doesn't
just happen because people arelike, Hey, I love the customers.
We put customer centric on thewebsite. It's top down and it's
(27:34):
cultural.
Matt Best (27:35):
I think one example you gave there of the household
B to B, clearly, that's anoperating model. That's a sort
of directional challenge, which,as you said, is that is the top
down piece. There's the otherbits that Johnny talked about
there around your training,enablement, coaching. There's
culture as a that could be usedas a bit of a kind of umbrella
term, perhaps, that just sortof, yeah, that encapsulates a
(27:58):
lot of that stuff. I mean, wewould see them typically
challenges around, you know,remuneration and compensation as
being kind of key drivers. Arewe driving all of the right
behaviors? That's a bit more ofthe stick than the carrot. I
think there's for me, and whatI've seen in various businesses
is, and this is linked very muchto the culture, but it's almost
the people armed with or notnecessarily armed, and that's
(28:19):
probably the point, but taskedwith the job of looking after
the clients and growing clientsand how they are seen in the
under the CRO CRO banner, interms of the autonomy that
they're given, the capability toserve in the best possible way.
You know, the the level ofexperience that you're hiring.
I've seen organizations who seeCS as a feeder into sales or
(28:43):
product, and it's sort of partof and it's your will you go
into CS through being a goodsupport technician. So well,
that's, for me, is isfundamentally the wrong way
around, because CS is aboutdeveloping, nurturing the
relationships of those clientsthat define your business. So is
that something that that you'reseeing as well when you're not
necessarily just your clients,but also when you're out in the
(29:04):
market, is that still somethingthat you think, that we're all
sort of working towards?
Chris Regester (29:09):
I think, I mean, I think you're hitting on
something that's very clearly,very clearly a thing I would say
at the top, on the on thecultural level. So, you know,
you talk about, you know, maybeculture is the rapper, and a
good way to reflect on it as anorganization is like, Who are
the HEROES in your company? Andin most companies I've ever
seen, heroes are either theseller who lands the big deal or
(29:29):
it's the engineer who, you know,builds whatever it is the fancy
AI integration. But it'stypically, it's either an
engineer or it's a sales rep,you know, and that sales rep who
closes that deal and, you know,rings the bell or whatever they
do to celebrate, like, oh mygod, you did it. Meanwhile,
there's some CSM who's gonnahave to work that thing every
day for so long and and who getsremunerated off that deal. Is it
(29:51):
the seller who lands it, or isit the CSM who delivers the
continuous value? So I thinkit's a very interesting thing
now. And like, another way oflike, who are the heroes? Is,
what are the stories? Yeah, andthis is something that we talk
to our customers a lot about. Onthe post sale side, is the vast
majority of organizations, youknow, they'll celebrate their
victories in in sales in a bigway, and you communicate their
releases in a big way. Sothey're celebrating engineering,
(30:12):
they're celebrating sales. Butthe great stories that happen
post sale, they don't really getcelebrated. They need to get
communicated that much. Youknow, we got this new customer,
and we onboarded them in recordtime, we just renewed our, you
know, we really discussed them ablah, blah, blah. We, you know,
whatever it may be, people don'ttell those stories and share
those stories a little much soit becomes a little bit of a
self fulfilling prophecy thatculturally, the other areas are
more prominent in the business.I think the recruitment path
(30:36):
into CS or into post sale roleswas for a long time, what you're
saying, it's kind of like weused to joke about it, like, you
know, it's the elephant'sgraveyard. It's, you know, it's
that person that you really likein the company, like, Oh,
they're so likable. They'realready great at anything. No, I
shove them in CS, and I'd saythat that's how it was. I don't
think that's how it is now. I dothink it's changing. And sort of
(30:59):
my theory on this, and mymessage to anyone who better
listen to it, is that your postsale team in the organization
should be the most aggressiveteam you have any organization.
And that's a fairly for manypeople. That's a counter
intuitive pointing no salesshould be aggressive. But I'm
like, no post sale needs to bethe most aggressive part of the
organization, because they'rethe team that needs to say no
(31:20):
more than anyone else. So theyneed to understand they don't
work for the customer. They workfor the customer's objectives.
And so you align on what theobjectives are. And then, like,
Hey, you want to go up thatmountain, let's go. Get behind
me. Let's march up the mountain,or go there. And Midway, the
customer's like, oh, you knowwhat? I want to go over to
there. There's a nice picnicthat's going to have a picnic by
the river. And you're like, No,we're going up the mountain.
That's where we're going getbehind me, we got to go. And so
(31:42):
they've got to have thatassertive, aggressive mindset.
And I think we're seeing thathappen more, and it's a little
bit to do with, you know, postsell teams becoming more
commercial and more ownership ofrevenue, you know, that's
driving that mindset, but also arecognition that you can't just
hire the, you know, thefriendly, smiley, good culture
fit to manage the customers, youneed someone who's strong and
assertive, because managingcustomers sort of, you need to
(32:05):
be able to triangulate between adeep understanding of your
customer, a deep understandingof your product, and a deep
understanding of theirobjectives. And if you can
triangulate between those threethings, then you can deliver
value. And that's, you know,that's not a passive, you know,
happy, smiley, friendly personwho can typically do that.
Jonny Adams (32:24):
I mean, I love that golden nuggets coming out of
that. And one, one of the thingsthat we, you know, when Matt and
I were planning this session wethought would be valuable, is if
you could touch upon that sortof customer centricity and how
to build that strategy into yourbusiness. And I feel that you've
touched upon a real, sort ofimportant factor that I wanted
to amplify for the listeners. Itwas around connecting
(32:45):
aggression. I thought there's aninteresting word you chose, by
the way, you know that's becausethat could be seen in a certain
way. But as you then went on todescribe it was really
interesting about connecting thedots of the customer objectives,
which I think is lost in so manybusinesses. You might think
about what you do, what we do asa professional service firm is
that, I think it comes to themindset shift of thinking about
outcomes first and then comingtowards understanding how you
(33:09):
can support that client, andspecifically, whether you're
working at plan out or SBR, youdo a similar thing, right? But
understanding objectives andoutcomes are really crucial. We
need to understand those of ourclient base and then work
towards those. If you'rethinking about building a
customer centric strategy withinan organization, one of those
things would be understandingyour customers objectives. What
would be some of the otherfacets that make up a really
(33:31):
strong customer centricstrategy?
Chris Regester (33:33):
No, I think that's a great one. So I think
that that's that's got to be,you know, almost the, you know,
top of the tree is understandingcustomer outcomes. But I think
it's a little bit, I would say,maybe bigger than that. So in
the anecdote I gave that SAScompany, they've designed their
operating model around velocity.And I would argue, you know, you
need to design your operatingmodel around customer outcomes.
(33:54):
So for example, you say, well,in marketing, when they're
filling in a lead form on thewebsite, that lead form should
have categorizations to whatthey want to achieve, that
information needs to be therefor sales rep and CRM, so that
they can then have a verydefined narrative around those
things. But it's refined. Thenyou have a kickoff call when
they convert, what are youroutcomes? This is what we
(34:15):
understand. This is how we godeeper in it. And then that's
reviewed every quarter and andsort of you, you build a
framework around objectives thatbecomes a consistent language
and narrative that a prospecthears, a lead hears, and a
customer hears, and they hear acontinuously, no matter who they
talk to in the organization.When they read your newsletter,
they hear the same language.When they look into product,
(34:36):
they see the same language likethat, familiarity around
objectives is very, verypowerful. So that operating
model of a pure alignment movingproduct, you know, what products
building, what marketing istalking about, what sales is
pitching, you know, CS isdelivering. That's, I think, the
core of customer centricity whenyou're thinking about about
objectives. And then, and that'ssort of like a virtualization of
(34:57):
it. And then I think you alsocan think about it horizontally,
where you say. So it also needsto, you need to realize that
it's not just the group ofpeople who are, you know, it's
not just the customer managersor the CSMs, but the once
they're a customer, it's now acollective responsibility, and
that's sort of another piece youhave to operationalize. So does
everybody understand their roleand responsibility towards the
(35:19):
customer, and what they've gotto do, you know, to get the
customer towards theirobjectives, which very often,
you know, isn't, isn't the case.And there's so many interesting
kind of operational tactics youcan bring in to kind of drive that.
Matt Best (35:31):
So Chris, circling back to what you shared earlier,
around how plan hat was wasformed, and the nature in which
you were able to do that throughbootstrapping, but with a
continued focus on value anddelivering value to your
customers. If you're out thereand you don't make necessarily
have that option, right? Maybeyou can't bootstrap it yourself.
How do you stop yourself fromgetting distracted by those
(35:53):
other things that are out therethat might pull you offline and
remain focused on delivering andfocused on value to the customer?
Chris Regester (36:00):
I think it's, to some extent, you know, if you're
not bootstrapping and, you know,say you're, you know,
capitalizing the business withinvestment. You know, at some
point it's just like that'sbecome, you know, the way the
world works. You know, at somepoint, you know, when a VC looks
at your business, theyunderstand that your growth will
slow to the point of your netretention. So if your net
retention is 120% your growthwill become 20% over time. So
(36:21):
the sort of this, like, youknow, we're all intrinsically
motivated to drive growth fromour customers, because
ultimately, that's how peopleare going to value the business.
When you look at, you know, whenyou look at analysis of ARR
growth of a company against NRRof a company, you get a higher
multiple valuation if your nr ishigher, rather than, if your AR
growth is higher, which I thinkis, for a lot of people, isn't
immediately obvious. You sort ofassume, or I got 100% growth,
(36:44):
everyone will value usmassively. But actually, if
you've got 100% growth or 60%net churn, you don't get a good,
a good valuation. So, yeah, Ithink that's, there's a little
bit of, you know, it happensnaturally, and then a little bit
it's just sort of, it's adiscipline that we're all
learning, I would argue thatmost, or many, many companies
have been about built withoutthat, and you can, of course,
survive for a very long time byjust focusing on new business.
(37:06):
You know that, you know, we'veall, you know, been in companies
that have done that. You can dothat, but like this, you know,
SaaS, company I mentioned, youknow, they did incredibly well.
That's why we all know theirname. But now it's not
sustainable, so I think that hasto be its recognition, like, at
some point you need to figurethis out. So it makes a lot of
sense to do it early on. And oneof the things that I'm seeing
(37:26):
now, which I think is reallyinteresting, is what a couple of
things. So one is that morestartups are thinking about post
sale and customer life cyclesearlier on than they were
before. That's very, very clear,right? It used to be these sort
of think about, how do we builda product and sell it and then
product and sell it? And then,you know, it'll be a perfect
product. Life will be good. Butinstead, now we're seeing more
people think like that, and morepeople building it into the
(37:49):
product. Which is where I thinkthis will all go in a couple of
years, is that products willhold the objective and, you
know, everything will be, youknow, you productize customer
management, which makes a lot ofsense over time.
Matt Best (38:00):
That's really interesting, the concept of
productizing, customermanagement, and I guess there's
that on that journey working outwhere to point your resource in
the in the most appropriate wayto maintain and develop and grow
those relationships. If you'resat listening to this podcast
now, and you're a businessthat's starting to see an
increase in churn, let's sayyou're a software business,
you're starting to see anincrease in churn. You're not
(38:21):
really sure where it's comingfrom. You've got an established
customer success team. You'vegot a healthy pipeline of new
business. Where would you advisesomeone in that position to go
look first?
Chris Regester (38:32):
So I think the foundation to a lot of these
things, it's hard, and thehardest thing about per sale is
it is different for everyorganization. It's just like the
moment anyone starts talking ingeneric language around post
sale. There's no point inlistening anymore, because it
is. It's just different. Are youselling to enterprise, selling
to SMB? Is it a verticallyintegrated What are you selling
(38:55):
like? There's so many things toit, but there's clearly
something around you. Need toidentify cohorts in your
customers, and you need to lookat cohorts by multiple different
dimensions. So look at cohortsby size. What's their spend with
you? What's that potentialspend? By geography? Look at the
year of sale, productconstellation, all of those
things you need to look atcohorts see if you can isolate
(39:17):
problematic cohorts and positivecohorts is clearly a thing.
There you go. Look at lifecycle. You know you want to
have, at all times, arudimentary life cycle. And you
want to have some sort of kindof North Star indicators of
outcome success or outcomeachievement. Some people talk
about that as a health score. Ithink that you know health
scoring, so some good things tothem, some silly things to them.
(39:40):
But you need some sort of NorthStars of, is there, you know,
are we? Are we achievingoutcomes with our customers?
They seem to be the foundationso segmenting, thinking through
a life cycle, ensuring that it'sbeing executed, and then having
some sort of, you know, guidingmetrics around outcome
achievement, they're thefoundational pieces we always
you know, try and coach people towards.
Matt Best (40:01):
Fantastic. And Jonny and I both kind of nodding along
there. I think we would, wewould absolutely concur with
that. I've got one finalquestion for you, and this might
be a tricky one, but obviously,at plan hat, you use plan hat,
right? What of the features, ifyou had to pick two features,
would you say that your teamappreciate most from the product?
Chris Regester (40:22):
We did a new thing recently, which I thought
was interesting and a goodexample. So I think when you
have an organization, whetherit's you know, a sale, whatever
team it is, like you, one thingthat is becoming clearer and
clearer is like, you need to bemeasuring how people are
spending their time at scale,not not at a micromanagement
level, but on the post salepoint side, that could be things
like, maybe you institute a newidea of like, we're going to
(40:43):
start doing ebrs. EBR makessense. We're going to do
executive business reviews ofour customers. Sounds logical.
We should do it. But then ifyou're going to institute that,
you're going to spend all thistime setting them up and
building them out, then you'vegot to measure what actually
changes as a result of doingthem. And I think a lot of
people don't do that. They'rejust like, let's start doing
this thing intuitively. Itsounds like it makes sense, and
(41:05):
then six months later, like,hey, was it worth it? We've
spent 1000 hours on that thing,and you don't know. So one of
the interesting things that planhad is that it's very flexible
data model, so you can reallymeasure absolutely anything
against any other data point. Soone thing we did recently was we
launched a whole bunch of newsequences to our customers. And
so these are really to driveeducation and adoption of our
users. And what we did is wedecided we were going to AB test
(41:27):
it. So we built out all thesesequences, you know, informing
people about ways to use the,you know, the product and
whatnot. But we sent to our SMBcustomers, our mid market
customers, we purposely didn'tto the enterprise. And then, you
know, we sent this out a bunchbased on various triggers in the
system, and then in June, wewere able to do analysis on it,
and we saw that users in the SMBand a mid market cohort who'd
been receiving these sequences,their adoption of 65% higher
(41:50):
than users in the enterprisecustomers who not been receiving
these sequences, despite allbeing kind of new users within
the same period of time. Sothere's huge rally for our team
and for our customers around theability to kind of one, you
know, push this stuff out andengage with all of your users
automatically. You know, we'reengaging with all these users
our team is managing, you know,without having to do anything,
but to really, really evidencethe impact of it, which was,
(42:12):
which was really powerful. Ithink another thing that our
team likes a lot, and a lot ofour customers use as well as we
have this concept ofcollaborative portals, where you
could take absolutely any of thedata in plan had, and you can
share it in real time with yourcustomer. If you imagine you're
an organization who's got 10,000customers, and you know, as the
kind of Pareto law 8020 thinggoing on. It's got these 8000
customers, they generate 20% ofrevenue. It's not, you know,
(42:35):
they're important, but not soimportant. But you still want to
give them a really nice a reallynice experience. So what you can
do plan hat is you could autogenerate dashboards showing
their usage, or auto generatepresentations around their usage
and their objectives, becauseyou got all of that data in plan
hat, and automatically share itin this portal. So then they
have this destination they cango to, and they're seeing, over
(42:55):
time, how their usage isimproving, and they're seeing
the ROI. So even though you as ateam aren't spending all the
time doing it, the customer isstill seeing the transparency in
the ROI and that it's alignedwith their objectives. So we use
them really heavily and so on.And then there's one, one thing
that we're doing now, which Ithink is, I think is actually a
really interesting concept,where in these portals, a
customer can go in and updateinformation there, and that
(43:17):
information, if they update it,that can update back into plan
head. So if you imagine, youknow, generally in post sale,
the way people have thought islike we as a company, as a
vendor, we need to choose thekind of content we're going to
send to our customers, becausewe are smart. We know what they
want. We know that a user withlow adoption, they need this
content, they need that content,and so on. But now the customers
can go into a portal. They canselect it. So it's like, when
(43:39):
you're a kid and you have those,you know, choose your own
adventure novels, and, you know,you roll the dice, and then it's
like, in the corner there's atreasure chest. In the other
corner there's an old lady, andyou're like, you know, you go to
the old lady and she turns intoa gremlin, or whatever happens,
like those, those kind of funbooks. But it's kind of like
that now, because in the portal,the customer could be like, you
(44:00):
know, you can ask in a portal,what are your objectives? The
customer selects two, and thatautomatically drops them into
sequences that start to educatethem around how to use your
technology to achieve thoseobjectives. So it's like a
choose your own adventure, butsort of reversed customer
management, which I think is avery interesting thing. It comes
back to what we said a momentago about productizing customer management.
Matt Best (44:19):
Chris, you said it goes back to productizing
customer management. That's realsort of demonstration of of how
that comes to light. I think onething that really jumps out to
me, and if I go back a number ofyears, back to when I was a CS
or a cam managementpractitioner, and you think if
you could have any wish, itwould be to automate some of the
management of some of yoursmaller customers, and to
(44:40):
provide you with relevantinsight at the right time, so
that you can be relevant to yourcustomer. And I think actually
what you've just articulatedthere, for me feels like exactly
that. It's like, how do we takeyou know, and that's for me, is
the sort of the fundamentals ofgood customer management, is
understanding your customer,understanding. You provide value
to your customer and making surethat you help them in seeing
(45:02):
that but also getting it. And Ithink actually those features
that you just articulated, Ithink, really enable that.
Chris, thank you so much forjoining us today. It's been a
fantastic discussion aboutclient centricity, and it's so
great to hear how plan hats outthere helping some of those
client managers or CSMs oraccount managers, or whatever we
want to call them, to really dothe very best job, to continue
(45:24):
to deliver value for theircustomer. And I think just
client centricity at the heartof growth is what we wanted to
talk about today. And I thinkactually, if we circle back to
that, what we've explored aresome really, really great ways
in which to do that. And Chris,you shared some fantastic
insight with our audience. So onbehalf of Jonny and I would like
to thank you so much for joiningus on the Growth Workshop Podcast.
Chris Regester (45:46):
Thank you for having me.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.