Mo McKibbin

I'm in the camp that sales is a strategy and not a skill set. When I think about driving growth at any part of the funnel, whether it's more obviously pre-sales, but also post-sales expansion adoption, it's really all just about helping the right customer. And when I say the term, customer, I also mean pre-sale customers. For me, everyone's a customer, whether or not they bought. So, helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Maybe that problem is, "I need to find more information about how to do my job better." That would be content, videos, best practices, things like that, and that is helping them solve the right problem that is relevant to the ecosystem of your products, at the right time. Maybe it's, "How do I apply this product to achieve this value proposition that I bought into during the buying process?" That would be more on the customer success side of like, "We're in the product now. I need to apply the product to achieve this desired business goal." So that would be solving the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. All of the operational theories, or structures, or methodologies, that I do is built around that concept. It's a little bit more holistically. Less about what sales does, or support does, or what success does, or what marketing does. It's more customer-centric because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a product-led growth company, or a sales-led growth company, or marketing-driven, or whatever. At the end of the day, the only thing that's driving revenue is the customer buying your product. So it's all about, "What will a customer find valuable in this moment? How do we consistently deliver it?"

So as far as putting this into three bullet points:

1) Investment in customer experience has contributed mostly to any sort of growth of businesses that I've had the joy of creating processes and operations for. That usually works, not only just by achieving incredibly high conversion rates – because I try to create approaches that are really tailored towards exactly delivering that right experience at the right, the right information to solve the right problem with the right time – but also word of mouth, and loyalty, and advocacy, and expansion. So I would say, I have no insights in the top-of-funnel or demand gen sort of world, as much as, it is all about nurture, conversion, solving problems, and then delivering a great experience that then causes word of mouth, loyalty, and expansion. So, the way that we do that from a tactical sense, is we create operational segmentation to facilitate scalable personalization. Now, that is a lot of buzzwords. I really like to take things apart and organize things. So, I like to organize my customers by operational segments, lifecycle segments, and personalization segments. So, operational segments has to do with the amount of touch that a customer requires. So a really common would be the difference between what is a low-complexity self-serve customer versus a high complexity enterprise customer, are probably the two ways to think about that. Then, personalization segments is, “What is this customer's desired outcome use case?” A good example for a tool that everybody uses, because it's the OG project management tool, is take something like Trello. If you're using Trello as a software company, you're using it very differently than if you're an event planner. Personalization segments are a little bit like, “What are the common goals that our customers are using these products for? And how do we create paths for them with enablement, with videos, with what we introduce them at the right time that are actually aligned with their goals?” There's a self-serve version of that, but then there's also a high touch version of that where it's more like coaching and consulting to get enterprises on the right path or change management within that. So, I think that that was just a big “one.”

2) After you break apart your operational segments, it's optimizing both for digital and human touch. I am of the mindset that you actually need both because you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. Some customers prefer self service and want to do all of that exploration on their own. They want to get information and they don't want to talk to anyone unless they absolutely have to. I'm a buyer like that. The only time I've ever bought something that required me to get on a phone or in person was my house. But, some people also really need it. Some people really need that extra help. I've acquainted it before as, “What is a better experience if you're in a hardware store? Is it somewhere where everything's really well outlined, so that you know exactly where to go and what to pick up for what you needed for your hardware product? Or is it something where someone greets you at the door, and they ask you about your project, and they give you consultative advice on what to do and how to pick things up?” The truth is actually both are great experiences, depending on the customer. If I am a seasoned person who knows what they're doing, and I want to get up and running right away, I want to just get in, get out, self-checkout, make it as seamless as possible. If I am starting a project on my bathroom, and I have no idea where to get started, I want to talk to someone and make sure I don't screw anything up. So, operational pathways based off of that segmentation, that's what it's trying to facilitate to create both a self-serve path, and so you can actually optimize the times that human touch is valuable and has an ROI because everything else is automated. So it's not one or the other. It's that they have to both work in tandem in order to work it successfully and scalably.

3) Once these operational systems are in place, I think the most important part of this puzzle is actually building feedback loops between the customer and the business. And so, by that I mean, between the voice of the customer and product, the voice of the customer and marketing or growth or however you're calling it, the voice of the customer and engineering, all of these arms of the business that have some sort of customer impact, building these feedback loops is, essentially, the investment in customer experience that causes customers to feel listened to. It makes it more of a relationship. From a product standpoint, you're building the right product for the right customer. If you can facilitate these feedback loops in a way that you can quantify, and understand, what customers want the most, essentially the impact it would be on the business from a growth and marketing standpoint, if you are building these feedback loops between what the customer is actually saying they find valuable, it makes it easier to then deliver to the top-of-funnel demand gen people that it's, "Oh, these are what we should be saying. Our value props are because this is how we're going to attract more successful customers.” And then, obviously, the most common on the support side of things, the success side of things, is engineering, because most people equate it with talking about support. But, I think the thing that I do that's kind of weird is that I think of it as feedback loops throughout the whole business, not just on the technical side.

I'm going to be a bit vulnerable. I constantly feel there's little battles all the time that are like, "Did I actually win this, or solve this, or it it just like a series of like minibuses advancing through the temples?" So, to be completely vulnerable, I don't know if I've ever solved any problems, but I do win tiny battles sometimes, and that is enough for me.

1) Making customer success a whole company sport. I think a lot of customers success leaders and support leaders will resonate with this. A lot of companies pay lip service to the value of it, but when it comes down to it, their decision-making processes are actually still quite a bit top-down, or hierarchal, or like, "No, that's for product to research," or "No, this is for marketing to figure out and then tell you," and like create kind of these top-down approaches. In order for the models that I usually create, operational systems, to be successful, it's actually all about the middle-out. So, it's all about aggregating feedback from the customer and facilitating these feedback loops between these departments, and the customer. Customer success is a really like misunderstood discipline to the point where I think even people in customer success don't all understand customer success. So I just call myself customer success because it's the closest thing to what I do. I can share how I define it. I don't really think of customer success as a team, or a department, or anything like that. I think of it as, "What makes our customers successful using the product? What is the easiest, most frictionless way to get them there?" And then, building operational processes that has those two goals in mind. Which is a whole company sport. When I think of what a Head of Customer Success is, it's the owner of that feedback loop, and the processes, and the cross-collaboration that comes into place. When you have teams, and people, and other leadership, cross-functional leadership, that are used to working in more traditional, top-down decision-making and siloed departments, it becomes a little bit like, "What are you doing? Why are you doing this? This is my job.? Don't tell me…" It becomes a really tricky territory to navigate. It can be especially challenging if you don't have buy-in from C-level, if you don't have buy-in from the CEO, if you're not getting championed. There's always some leadership that's like, "This is so cool. I'm so on board. Please meet with me. Let's get your team's feedback. What are the customers saying?" Totally want to. And some are just like, "This is not your place." When trying to relationally navigate those, I think that's probably the biggest challenge for everybody in customer success. Because people just don't know how to deal with this team. Some people just think it's a glorified support team, or account management team, and then they're treated as such. If you treat a support team like it's a cost center, it's going to become a cost center. Or, if you treat account management like all it is is just like upsells, you're not actually going to get value out of the insights. The customer insights, and the relationships, and the ability to fill those feedback loops, is the thing that is valuable about the role. So, as far as overcoming challenges, that's one of the challenges that I feel like I'm constantly navigating. I originally was an actor and a comedian and I always think about the Steve Martin quote, "Be so good they can't ignore you." That's essentially the strategy that I try to take places. I'm just going to keep showing how valuable this feedback is, and how much the customers are buying more, and using more, and sharing more. It's essentially the way to overcome that organizational tension. It's hard, because I feel like people who gravitate towards support and success are usually highly empathetic, which means they're not usually like toot-your-own-horn types of people. So, I find that the best way to overcome that is to be a cheerleader for the department, the work, and the success. You have to say it over and over and over again and get people on board. Eventually, people are like, "Oh yes, this is valuable. You will get a seat at the table.” But, it can definitely be a slog because of those. We're talking about like decades of business structures and people's MBAs on operations. The truth is, we live in this totally new ecosystem and landscape of business that we can't actually apply by the same rules, because the way people buy is changing. The way we sell is changing. The way products help businesses, everything, is changing. So if we stuck to the old models, we're not going to actually have any success. So that was kind of a lot.

2) Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. This one I really do feel like I really overcame and it's great. So, I was just at a start-up – and I'm I still there, but we were aquired, so it's not really a startup anymore – where I literally built the entire customer operational process from scratch. I mean, it was like taking it out of 1996. Their sales process, they wanted them to call a sales number to a very specific, only-for-sales person to take these calls, and didn't want videos or anything, because it's like, “Oh, our competitors could steal our information.” It was a really old-fashioned sales process. Oh, the other thing is too, is they also treated all customers the same. The Moxion platform, it's a full production workflow platform for Hollywood productions and studios. Batman was on Moxion, Jurrasic World was on Moxion, really major productions, but also major studios. And so in the beginning, we were kind of treating, And so in the beginning, I wouldn't say they were treating everyone the same, but like definitely there was like a difference in attention that they would give like a production, like Batman versus like a production like, I don't know, some documentary on Netflix. There was some difference in touch, but it wasn't like it wasn't operationalized at all. When I started talking to customers and identifying the operational segments, it was revealed there's actually two entirely different customer types that we're kind of treating as the same. We have a studio customer type that uses the product in a totally different way than a production customer type. So we were onboarding studios the same way we were onboarding productions and they are a totally different set of needs, set of complexities. The way they utilize the product is completely different. Everything is different for these two types of customers. And yet, they're really intrinsically linked because the studios are actually who give you the productions. So, it ended up being kind of like discovering that, “Oh, actually what you have here is like almost like channel marketing or a franchisee type relationship where you have the studio, and then they give you productions.” And so, then there's a production buyer, and a studio buyer, that are inextricably linked, but they're actually two totally different customers that require totally different operational processes and amounts of touch. So once we kind of teased that out, it honestly made everything super smooth sailing. Because it was like, “Oh, now I know how to structure my team. I'm going to hire a studio success person that's going to be my high touch CSM. They're going to take care of the studios. Production Success is going to be my velocity success team. They're going to be a little bit more like support-driven growth methodology and do everything full lifecycle. Now we know exactly how to direct customers into the right path so that we can get them up and running right away, so it's not just handling every single person like they are a special case.” So I think that was a pretty notable challenge that had been overcome.

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I do have one major roadblock. Again, to be in a state of vulnerability, I don't know how I am going to survive this, but maybe talking about it will at least help other people who are in similar situations. Come find me and be my support group, or maybe get a braintrust together, because this has to be one of the most common problems for startups.

1) We were recently acquired. I've gone from someone who had a lot of autonomy on things like operations and toolings and systems. Obviously, I'm passionate about it, and have very strong opinions, and they work really, really, really well. like we like 4x’d our growth in like a year and a half, just from switching our operational processes. I wouldn't say just from that, but we actually don't have any top of funnel marketing, no demand gen. Everything was expansion, loyalty and word of mouth. Like every single thing. So, I think that's pretty remarkable, and also our customers are Amazon, Disney, Apple, Netflix. I think it's pretty remarkable for not having any go-to market, except for basically our customer success team and a CEO who's really charismatic and a great salesperson in his own. That's it. That's like what our go to market team is. So, um, so anyway, so I. I don't. So constantly, what I'm hearing is, “What you're doing is so cool. It's really impressive what you did. It's not how we operate at Autodesk. So, how do we break these things apart and move them into Autodesk processes?” And again, this is kind of what I was talking about with the siloed approaches or top-down. Well, the point is you can't, you can't actually do it. It's a totally different way of operating, and we can either stop operating that way, and just operate in your way, but it's gonna be a complete organizational overhaul. Um, So I just like, they're leaving us be for a year, but after that, they need to start integrating us. Seeing this tsunami of change coming, and you can't fight the tsunami, that's not an option, you will lose, like it’s an 11,000 person company, I'm not stupid. But like, “Well, do I run or do I surf?” I don't know what the right one, I'm not particularly great at surfing in real life. I've done it. I enjoy it. But, the exhilaration from it comes from like, “Oh my God, I didn't die today.” So that's the major thing. Honestly, it's taking so much of my energy, because I like oscillate between, “Oh, this is a really cool opportunity for like change management in an organization and understanding how these pieces fit.” And then it's also like, “I just need to tear apart something that I just gave birth to that I'm really proud of and give pieces away to different departments.”

It's so funny, because we talked about this in the initial conversation that I don't really think of things in terms of mental models. But then, I saw one of your LinkedIn posts about other people's mental models, and I was like, “Ooh, I think I can like at least package one into something cute.”

1) The Home Edit Model. I'm calling it the Home Edit model. I don't know if you watch the home edit. I think I mentioned before, I love organization. In general, I'm a relatively organized person when it comes to my house. I just really love systems that work. It just like eliminates chaos. If you don't have to think about stuff that doesn't matter, you have so much more space to think about the stuff that does matter.I love my parents, but they were both very disorganized people, and so I feel like I grew up in this very disorganized environment and I had a really hard time navigating it when I was a kid. Now, as an adult, I'm just like, “Systems for everything.” The Home Edit is an organizational show on Netflix and essentially, their Step-1 is just like, “Take everything out of the pantry or take everything out of the closet. Just take everything down.” I do this in my physical space. I do this in my like intellectual space, or in work. When I started the operational process of the company, I'm just like, “Give me all the customer data that you have out of Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever. All of the customer data. All of the processes. All of everything.” Then, I just like lay it out in a huge matrix, and put everything in like little piles of like, “Who are the buying roles? What are the use cases people are using things for? How are they using this?” Essentially, taking everything that might be on like an ideal customer profile type of thing, and just taking all the data and just organizing it into piles and then talk it. That's where I get my operational segments, and my personalization segments. From there, it becomes talking to customers and that's where I get my customer journey. So then, I start to map trends among those customers in terms of how they do things, what they're doing, what their goals are. And then, I line it up with these like organizational piles, until we create a system out of them. So, I'm calling it the Home Edit.

2) Inversion. So, and especially when it comes to Customer Success, I think is a super relevant. Who are our most successful customers? And then how do we take what they're using things for, what they find valuable, and what's happening right now, that's like really, really working, and then how do we throw that up the funnel so that, we can have more information, or demos, or videos, or things that then reflect all of those to basically attract the right type of customer. So just taking everything, instead of top-down thinking, thinking like, “Okay, these customers are successful, how do we get there? How do we get more of them? How do we do that?” So I utilize that technique, or mental model, a lot.

3) Circle of Competence. The other thing I do very frequently, which I'm not sure is a mental model, but I did look up mental models and one of them was called Circle of Competence, and this is definitely a way I operate. I am just a super old soul that must have just come from when we were just egalitarianism, wandering humans. So, I just love working collaboratively with people on things. I have only the piece of the puzzle that I have, but then there's other people who have pieces of puzzles and experiences that I don't have. So essentially, what I'll try to do is get as much of a plan, or a thought, together on paper as possible, so there's some sort of like focus to the discussion, but then completely open it up to anyone that is involved to get feedback and point of view, and adjust. Sometimes it's funny because ometimes people will see me bring together a document, which is literally just me throwing my thoughts on paper just so I have an organized way of framing how I'm thinking, and some people will think that like, “Oh, did you intend for this to be the finished product?” And it's like, no, I intended this to be like the jumping off point for other people to start l weighing in and things like that. And that's usually how I work with my individual team. We’ll think of what some problems are. I'll put some of my own thoughts on paper, and then like just open it up to everybody, just adding their thoughts. Sometimes we end up on something that's very different from what it started, and sometimes we don't, and sometimes it's just a more fully-fleshed out version. So, collaboration and working with more minds.

1) Tight feedback loops with your customers. People build healthy relationships when they feel like they're being listened to, and responded to, and that they're part of the relationship. So the way that we do this at Moxion, and also did it at HelpScout, and this is where that support-driven growth sort of methodology is, we almost treat our support team almost like miniature customer researchers. So, when feedback comes in, we have like a series of questions to make sure that we're getting the heart of the problem that they're trying to solve, as opposed to a specific feature requests or things like that. Then, we actually track and aggregate all those trends internally and then bring them to product. When we see the biggest trends are bubbling to the top, we segment those trends by impact. So, either it's like high-value customers or high volume customers. The other thing that we do is have a differentiation between a feature request and a problem area. We actually call them hot potatoes, but a problem area is probably a better way to think about it. A feature request is something that is straight up, “yes or no.” For example, “Do you support Dolby Vision?” Yes. “Do you support X?” No. Like, there’s not more than one way to peel a potato. It's like a yes or no answer. That's a feature request. A problem area is one of those things where sometimes the customers ask for a feature the way they would solve a problem, but that might not be the best way to solve that problem. So, if there's more than one way to peel a potato, it's a hot potato. So when we get hot potatoes, we try to identify what they're trying to accomplish, what their end goal is, how much pain it's causing them. So when can relay that to product, we can bring it in a way that is not a poor way to solve the problem, and they can actually think about how to solve that problem, but the problem still exists. So we have some really good operational systems in place where we aggregate these. Obviously, I'm a HelpScout fan girl for obvious reasons, but HelpScout JIRA has like a really solid integration where you can log or link anything from HelpScout. But then, on top of that, if it gets closed in JIRA, it actually reopens in HelpScout, so it creates this really awesome thing where you can connect all of these issues to particular things on the roadmap. And then, when they're either released or decided that they're not going to do it, it automatically opens up, so then you can immediately get back to the customer requesting. So this is great for win-back. I mean, this works for every side of the funnel, because from a pre-sales perspective, if a customer is asking for something, and they didn't buy because it's not released, it gets reopened immediately. We can reach back out, and be like, “Oh hey, this thing that you wanted, we have it now, do you want to try again?” Then also, when you have those types of tight feedback loops to the customer, then they really feel like they're being listened to, and those are actually the kinds of experiences that increase trust, advocacy, loyalty. I would say if you're don't have tight feedback loops with your customers, that's like step-1 customer experience that you’ve got to put into place. And the best way to do it is with the places that your customers are delivering feedback, which is mostly sales and support conversations. Because only a very small amount are going to fill out feedbacks, or surveys, or like things like that, and it's like important to have that stuff, but nobody's going to write support, asking for a question or delivering feedback, and then also do a survey. So, you have to aggregate the feedback exactly where your customers are getting it and giving it otherwise, you're just getting such a very limited sliver of who thinks what, and it's honestly like a pretty biased group of people that fills out surveys. So that's one number.

2) Operational segmentation. I spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about this, but just to put a button on it, operational segmentation by complexity and by goal or use case. So I call them personalization segments versus operational segments. Lifecycle segments are also good to have, but that's more of like the overarching, “What happens at what part of the process.” That is how I believe it's possible to create really personalized experiences at scale. A lot of folks questione the ROI of customer success because they think of it as working individually with customers to identify their goals and how to get them there. I think part of this has to do with my weird background of coming from a bunch of startups, so I've worn a lot of hats besides support and success and sales. I've also worn a product marketing hat, and there's actually a beautiful marriage between customer success and product marketing. One can be related to the engagement and understanding of the customer's goals and then product marketing can essentially scalify it and make that self-serve, digital touch approach to it. Two sides of the same coin: do the Home Edit technique, find your little operational segments, create those personalization pathways, and then create a digital version and use that digital version to also inform and enhance your high touch version. They should be best friends together.

3) Use that segmentation to create paths to nudge customers along the next step in their buying and adoption journey in multiple different ways. Once you have these operational pathways outlined, let's say you have, from Moxion, we have studio success, we have production success, but then on top of that, that's even layered, where we have, especially production success, you could use it for a production, you could use it for post-production, you can use it for finishing, you can use it for different parts of the film production lifecycle, which all have different ways of using the product and different goals, and different even sometimes different people are involved in those. Find out, “What is their primary goal? Are they using it for remote camera-to-cloud, for production? Are they using it for finishing review, with color review, at the very end stages?” Once you find out their primary goal, which anyone can just do from a dropdown menu. It's not brain surgery, just ask “What are you using Moxion for?” Okay, you have your answer. So then, making sure that their self-serve enablement path follows, “What are all the activation points? What are all the value points? What are all the things that they need to get on board as quickly as possible with that specific pathway?” Some people think like, “Oh, is the best way to do this in-app? Is the best way to do this over email? Is the best way to do this with human touch?” My answer to that is, that is what should be determined with your operational segments, what are the best channels to do this, but you probably should always do both email and in-app, because if you're just doing it in-app and they don't log in, it doesn't really matter. How much investment, in terms of reaching out, and making sure that they accomplish these milestones, and putting meetings or things in place, should have to do with how complex the customer is, and how much ROI that they have at the end of the day.

3 questions that I love to ask customers:

1) What are you trying to accomplish?

2) How are you currently doing this

3) How much pain is this causing?

Actually, it works for your team, too. Anytime someone comes to you with a problem. Get to the bottom of, What are they trying to do? What is their goal? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they currently doing this, in terms of what's not working? Or what are they trying to fix, and then, how big of a deal it is. That gives you so much insight into, “Okay, well, is this just somebody venting in a moment because they're irritated, but at the end of the day, it's actually not that big of a deal?” That works both for customers and your team. I think so many people try to give help without actually really understanding the core of a problem and what they're trying to do. It seems so basic, but like I think it maybe comes from thinking you have to help, or thinking you have to know everything. Very frequently, I see people jumping in and trying to solve problems before they even actually really know what the problem is that they're trying to solve. Always stepping back, and asking those questions, is going to make sure that you're giving the actual right help to solve a problem.

1) Jake Bartlett. First of all, I'm going to shout out this person because they just connected me with really cool people that I'm really excited to work for, but also him and I are on so much of the same wavelength for how we think about customer experience and the relationship between customer experience and growth and that realm. I do believe he is on tour with his band right now. He's a drummer, but he really is also a go-to-market customer experience leader.

2) Mercer Smith. The other person who is like-minded in the way that if you're looking for more of like my brain type of thinking, she is a huge customer experience superstar, across all. She's just like the best coolest human, too. So definitely her.

1) Join the Support Driven community. There's actually a really awesome community. It's so funny, because there’s this hidden side of go-to-market that is mostly Customer Experience and actually hiding kind of in Support in the shadows. So there's like a really awesome support community called Support Driven. It's a Slack community. I've been in part of that community for like 6 years. I'm giving a conference talk / workshop in Portland in June that is through that community. It's really a holistic customer experience communit. It's gathered around people who deliver support, but it also covers customer success. It's just a group of people who loves to deliver amazing customer experiences. Everyone has so many opinions about everything. I find in support communities, there's definitely like support people who are like, “Support should have nothing to do with revenue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then there's people that are like, “No, actually, everyone needs to have a stake in revenue because we're all building this business together. Support is actually driving a lot of value. When you cut that off it becomes it becomes a cost center, and then you do actually deliver a terrible customer experience because it's not being resourced effectively because there's not like a tied revenue.” So, I love that community because there's both sides of that in there, in the support community. It's just so funny how many people have all of these opinions about whether or not support is part of go-to-market or not. So, joining the Support Driven community.

2) Join the Launch Awesome community. Honestly, I am starting to work with another company in a consultative capacity that just launched another really good Slack community, but it's more on the product marketing side. My realm of belief system is in this weird, ambiguous, sales, support, success and product marketing blob. So, if you are resonating with what I say, and you are more on the product marketing side of stuff, there's a product called Launch Notes. Launch notes has a slack community called Launch Awesome. There's some like pretty impressive product marketers in there. It's just starting to spin up, but it looks like a good brain trust is happening there. Hopefully, if it has the same sort of momentum as Support Driven, I think it could be what Support Driven is for customer experience professionals, I think that could be for product marketing professionals, which is another unsung hero group of the go-to market team.

3) Three books that I recommend. One of them is not a support book, but it’s still really influential to me and how I think about things and operate. The three books that I recommend anyone to read who just wants to think more about customer experience, especially like frictionless experiences or things like that:

Connect with Mo on Linkedin → Mo McKibbin

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