[00:00:00] Joe Di Grande: And the way we did that, again, with this particular segment at that organization at the time, there was no phone calls. It was very scalable. There was very little touch point, hence the name Tech Touch. But yeah, we would actually look at, hey, based on this, kind of see correlations. Maybe this particular segment of similar customers on our higher touch accounts saw increases of X. Okay, then we also would look at how many, as far as like, subscribers have been here for two years, one year, three year, how would they behave, higher increases, lower increases? So it was kind of a combination of a couple of different variables.

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:58] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:01:11] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics, and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:22] Andrew Michael: Hey, Joe, welcome to the show.

[00:01:23] Joe Di Grande: Awesome. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:25] Andrew Michael: It’s great to have you. For the listeners, Joe is the founder of Joe Does Tech Touch, a boutique customer success automation consulting firm. Prior to that, Joe was the VP of customer success and group subscriptions at Business Insider. So my first question for you, Joe, is what is the craziest automation you have set up in CS before?

[00:01:45] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say some of the craziest things that we've done is… I've done with customers, is renewals. I think a lot of people, especially, obviously if CS teams are focused on renewals and are directly involved in them, I think it's something that's underestimated by a lot of companies and proven to have great success and of course a direct correlation to like NRR.

[00:02:07] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Do you want to tell us about one specifically?

[00:02:09] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. So I think, you know, kind of going back to a couple of roles back, but I would say we would look at a couple of different segments of customers and break them down into either industry as well as what they're currently paying. And then we would give a couple different pricing increases over time and say like, okay, based on the data, you know, here's some, we have a kind of a judgment call of, because maybe it's their tenure or maybe it's based on usage. We'd give them, you know, annual increases of X percent higher versus another smaller cohort.

[00:02:41] Joe Di Grande: And when we would fire off the emails, we would actually tie them to a promotion end date. Right? Like, creates emergencies similar to sales, right? Like, hey, if you're working with any sort of SaaS provider, odds are if they're going to want to get a deal done, you know, when you're having those physical conversations, they're going to entice you with, hey, this contract is only available by X date. Kind of the same thing, but all can be done virtually via email. And it works just the same.

[00:03:06] Joe Di Grande: So once you have those different cohorts built out of what you want to charge a customer and have those conversations, streamline that process. And of course, what comes of that is having the data structured and the way that you can launch that automation. We saw great success where I had a team at one point managing around a team of two, managing 700 accounts companies in one segment, which normally would take the, roughly in that organization about eight to 10 reps is essentially kind of, we kind of diverted and made sure that they were focused on higher opportunities. So that was one example. And then of course, some others as well.

[00:03:43] Andrew Michael: Interesting. And just to understand that quickly as well, you would have price increases, but there would be different depending on how long companies had been your customer and the industry.

[00:03:54] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. So that’s–

[00:03:54] Andrew Michael: It wouldn't be just like a general price increase across the board. You actually had specific price increases by customer segments in tenure.

[00:04:01] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. So it was also, the one caveat to that, that I'll call out is it was dependent on how the company was actually initially sold by new business. So some people were on old, older rate cards and some of them needed an upsell organically. The way we did that, again, with this particular segment at that organization at the time, there was no phone calls. It was very scalable. There was very little touch point, hence the name Tech Touch.

[00:04:26] Joe Di Grande: But yeah, we would actually look at, hey, based on this, kind of see correlations, maybe this particular segment of similar customers on our higher touch accounts saw increases of X. Okay. Then we also would look at how many, as far as, like subscribers have been here with two, for two years, one year, three year, how would they behave higher increases, lower increases? So it was kind of a combination of a couple of different variables.

[00:04:52] Andrew Michael: Nice. I think it's an interesting way as well in general, like if you're raising price across the board to upsell, to yearly plans or monthly, I think, is another way to segment and look at. I'm going to put that in my bucket of things to test at some point.

[00:05:06] Joe Di Grande: For sure.

[00:05:06] Andrew Michael: Cool. So Joe, like tell us a little bit about yourself. Like obviously you've now started Joe Does Tech Touch, very specific to like, customer success automation. What is it exactly that you do today and how are you helping companies?

[00:05:18] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, no, I'm happy to give some background. I've been pretty much in CS and like retention and account management for just about 10 years. And given the background of my role in managing accounts, I'm always looking to work smarter versus harder. And organically, through managing my own book of business, I use technology tools like Salesloft or let's say Outreach. Obviously, now there's CS platforms now, such as Vitally, I know, is a partner with you in the show or Gainsight, et cetera. And just to really make my life easier, how can I manage more and do more with less?

[00:05:53] Joe Di Grande: Thinking of that is when I started to work on building out these segments, I was actually for a different company I worked for, eMarketer. Worked on building out that entire segment, bringing on a test subject of 62 accounts all the way to that 700. Basically, I knew there was a knack for it because this was early on. This was going back to approximately 2017, 2018. I knew that just based on how the market was going, automation was becoming more prevalent. AI wasn't even really talked about, but it was around at that point. I knew like, hey, I need to double down on this.

[00:06:24] Joe Di Grande: Fast track to today is where I've worked with a couple different companies where I've implemented the technology such as, you know, CS platforms and sales engagement platforms, et cetera, in order to scale those teams and make them more efficient. What Joe Does TechTouch does in my team is we'll actually, there's a gap, right? So if a company has an issue with, hey, we have, budget for tech or solutions as opposed to people, I'm your guy. The problem is, where do I even start? Given my background, that's where I could help navigate that. And that's navigating whether it's evaluating a different vendor to get that solution figured out.

[00:07:00] Joe Di Grande: Are they even ready to acquire such a solution based on their data infrastructure? A lot of times I'll work with organizations, they don't even have the data at all or the, structured in a way that we could send it to a customer success platform or fire off using a marketing automation solution as well. So I would kind of do that audit and making sure that they can launch that program.

[00:07:22] Joe Di Grande: From there, we come up with a game plan, we implement that strategy, whether it's the technology itself, implementing a strategy. And then of course, optimization as, like that third bucket. And then of course, on a smaller scale as well, we work with different CS leaders on coaching as well, and we're one-to-one coaching to make sure that we set them up for success just the same.

[00:07:43] Andrew Michael: Nice. All right, I think it would be interesting maybe just to run through like a fake scenario, but let's say I come to Joe and I'm saying, I have the budget. For tech, not for people.

[00:07:53] Joe Di Grande: Yep.

[00:07:54] Andrew Michael: Where do we get started? Help me through this.

[00:07:56] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. No, it's a good question. First thing first is looking at what you have, right? Or actually looking at the problem first and foremost, right? So yes, you have the budget. That's fantastic. That's one big step of the battle, right? To get done. Now it's a matter of like, okay, what's, the actual problems that I'm going to solve? So if you're looking to scale, what I always say is looking at what's repeatable, still takes time. But it could be tedious, right?

[00:08:21] Joe Di Grande: It's like, hey, I wish if someone could do this for me or I could just get this to be more scalable, I could use a lot more brain power to have this, to 10X this other project that I'm working on, whether that's up increasing, obviously, NRR or just maybe having more phone calls with higher key stakeholders at those organizations, right? If it's more of like a low touch or proper scaled CS approach. But the point is, focus on what that problem is and your KPI. Then it… okay.

[00:08:51] Andrew Michael: I'll tell you what my problem is at the moment is that we have a small CS team set up where two people, we are able to serve a sort of like our mid markets and enterprise clients, but we are doing nothing for the SMB sector and almost nothing for the most part for the mid market as well. So there's a big segment that we just aren't able to serve today. We think there's an opportunity to service that market. We're just not sure how we can go about this effectively because hiring new people is not going to help in that space. So what are we going to do there?

[00:09:22] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, no, it's a good question. So I'd say the first thing's first, right? We obviously have to make sure that they're going to be retained. I think, in my opinion, retention is going to be key, making sure that they actually renew. That's step one. And of course, that's going to be based on an evaluation of when are they coming up for renewal? So that's step one. Step two, you would look at, Okay, what's, based on how, does your product work, right? And how are people getting registered on their product, do we have engagement data?

[00:09:49] Joe Di Grande: So you'd typically probably work with someone that's within engineering, on the data side, product, to really understand that user level data. And then at the same time, your best point of contact, if this department exists, is gonna be customer success or sales operations, because they're gonna be the ones that are setting up your CRM or customer success platform and seeing if we're tracking any data that's gonna be inputted by your reps.

[00:10:14] Joe Di Grande: Now, in your case with that SMB piece, most of the time, how did they get in the funnel? So were they talking to a sales rep first? Those people are probably going to be the best people to talk to or just understand what that process looks like. Cause they're going to be inputting data if they're having conversations and so on. Unless it's fully self-service too, which is a different thing.

[00:10:33] Andrew Michael: Well, at the moment it's fully self-service and we don't have an ops team.

[00:10:36] Joe Di Grande: Yep. So fully self-service.

[00:10:40] Andrew Michael: I'm going deep into this.

[00:10:41] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. No, it's good. At some point if they're self-service, you're still going to have some transactional data, right? So like if you're using, let's say, Stripe to process payments, great. You're going to know when they're going to renew. Perfect. That's your first base. And why I'm hung up on that renewal date is you could do a couple of things with that. You have essentially like your account lifecycle. Timing is your best friend when you're first starting off. And with a lot of automation tools, you could pretty much take that date field and just say, hey, with an X number of days since the time of renewal, right?

[00:11:15] Joe Di Grande: If maybe, if it's an onboarding campaign, maybe it's adoption focus and then it's renewal, you could fire off those very bare bones, simple email campaigns. That's number one. So I think, like as a first step, getting some of those core pieces and also like how much are they paying? Right? I think if you already have that segment built out, right? SMB, it's already predefined, which is great. That's one step. But dates are going to be key, I think, is going to be the first bet.

[00:11:41] Joe Di Grande: And also, too, if again, self-service, who's your point of contact? In that case, if it's self-service, likely that person's getting labeled as an admin. They're clearly a decision maker of some sort, right? They made a transaction, they purchased. So therefore that's who you should be kind of working with and going from there.

[00:11:58] Andrew Michael: Okay. And from the Tech Touch perspective, then like you would start with email sequencing, then by the sounds of it and get set up, like any specific set up that you prefer as well. So you mentioned before we got started, that like, it's, almost always begins with data and having like a good data set up. So what should our data look like in this case, to be able to get started with something like this?

[00:12:19] Andrew Michael: Obviously we, as you mentioned, we're using Stripe. So we do have the start date and we have how much they're paying us. We are using, like a product analytics tool. So we have some data. It's not great, but it gives us some insight into our customer base. So what should that look like then in order to be able to start setting up these automations and structure it?

[00:12:39] Joe Di Grande: I would say the key thing is, right, if you don't have an engineering team of any sort, like that's number one, I think you said you didn't have an ops team, but the key thing is if you're looking at that usage data, it's going to be tough to kind of leverage on your own unless it's centralized in one source. I'd focus almost like, on that account information, like who that customer is, what they're paying and start there one step at a time.

[00:13:01] Joe Di Grande: How it should be structured. I would say bare bones for right now, get it in a spreadsheet. Ironic coming from me, cause I'm not a big believer in spreadsheets overall, because you should be leveraging your CRM. But just from like a visual standpoint, it's also helpful for people to understand how, CRM works, ‘cause it's just a fancy spreadsheet at the end of the day, right? So taking that setback, getting it in there, it's two different buckets. You have your account level data and your contact level data. So there should be two different tabs within that, right? You're two different objects in a CRM, filling out all that information.

[00:13:35] Joe Di Grande: And then I think the biggest thing too, as far as what you're using, right? Let's say you're really bootstrapping it. You really need to figure out, like maybe some free solutions. I mean, when I started Tech Touch originally, I was using, it still exists today, a Mail Merge add-on to Outlook. This is going years back. But the point is highly not advisable now due to, you know, getting caught up in spam. But the point is, is that, start to familiarize yourself as far as what you're using and that will help you structure the data in the right way.

[00:14:04] Joe Di Grande: I'll give a very concrete example. Some solutions won't be able to tell you, let's say, is very different in just putting a date, right? They're gonna expire on 12-31-2024. That's a very different value than saying, hey, they're expiring in 180 days from now, right? So can your solution, whether it's a marketing technology, sales engagement technology, CS platform, whatever it is, read the data in that way. So I think it's twofold, but start with the basics. I think that's the number one thing, figure out what you need in order to solve that problem.

[00:14:39] Andrew Michael: You know, solve it? Yeah, I think one of the interesting things, I think that we don't do a good job in either, like small touch or high touch, is really communicating the value that the product delivers. And I think this can be done in a Tech Touch manner. So I'm keen to hear, like some of the ways you see this done with customers. Cause I think one of the things that we've heard a lot in the podcast as well as like, QBRs like are dying.

[00:15:01] Andrew Michael: Some people are really dramatic around it and then it's the end of QBRs, which I think they still value in the right setting, but a lot of it can be done from a Tech Touch perspective. So I'm keen to hear, like, how you help companies with replacing something like a QBR, which is a timely process and something that could potentially help in the SMB and mid market segments.

[00:15:21] Joe Di Grande: Yeah. So there's a couple of ways of doing this, especially now with a lot of the solutions that are out there. Like CS platforms because they do provide, like a quick snapshot automatically through their product itself and kind of highlighting those KKPIs. But if we want to take a step back and get some crafty ways of doing, especially if you're just starting out, I would say it's a couple of things. One, are they, we're talking about value, right? If they're getting typically the most value out of the solution, if the product is set up in this way, right? They could either, if you have soft limits and they exceed those soft limits, let's call that out.

[00:15:54] Joe Di Grande: If they’re under, right, they're not taking advantage of fully what they purchased. They bought 10 licenses and they're taking advantage of only five. There's something that we can do there to make sure that they're fully yet taking advantage of it. So it's also, you know, it's key things to keep in mind, like more very tactical things that drive that value and highlighting it. And I would say it's incrementally providing it to that point of contact.

[00:16:18] Joe Di Grande: Outside of that, there are some solutions that I have used in the past at different organizations as well where it will provide like a full, I think I was speaking to this in the beginning, but it provide a full snapshot of like how engagement is and it'll actually embed it within an email. It's great. It is tough though. I haven't had figured out the right way as far in a sense of like, proof of that value, because it's just, it's static, right? At the end of the day, you still need that person to kind of highlight, like why this is important.

[00:16:47] Joe Di Grande: You can get crafty as far as of course, like highly in the email, right? Like here are the key things you need to keep in mind of where you could improve and then where you're really exceeding above average. But I think there's also too, right now, a lot of emphasis on in-product messaging as well that's starting to come up a little bit more. I think at the beginning it was more of a nuisance for a lot of customers, but I'm starting to see it more, be highly prevalent for walkthroughs, notify users of changes, and I think that's going to start to come back as well.

[00:17:18] Andrew Michael: That's an interesting point. I want to touch on it after this question or this statement as well is that I think one of the companies that I like from the Tech Touch perspective that does this, I think well is Loom and Loom have like picked a very specific metric to focus on, which is like meetings replaced or hours saved for your team. And obviously it speaks to their positioning as well and how they see themselves as a product service, but I think it's always good to see, like that email come in like, you saved your team eight hours this month of meetings. Like that's something, you know, that people don't enjoy.

[00:17:47] Andrew Michael: So one it's like, oh yes, like, bonus. And two, like it speaks to their product. Whatever. So I think the challenge is like finding that in your product. There's well, like, how can you figure out what that real value is that, like pushes on the pain point that they had to begin with. And it actually, you can tie it back to ROI because the eight hours would have been like eight hours of the team, which costs X number of dollars as well. So you can almost do the math in your mind as, of like, what Loom is saving in becomes a no-brainer. So yeah, I like those examples.

[00:18:16] Andrew Michael: You mentioned then as well, like the Tech Touch aspect in product. And I think this is not something that was relevant before. And it was typically, like more of like a growth sort of initiative or an actual product initiative to be in and think about. I have started hearing more CS teams be involved in this, like in a Tech Touch space within product and notifications and automation as well.

[00:18:37] Andrew Michael: And I'm keen to hear maybe just like, from a full automation perspective, like what are the touch points where you see like some of the most sophisticated CS teams that are running Tech Touch programs? At which stages of the user journey are they getting involved? And how are they getting involved?

[00:18:51] Andrew Michael: So obviously like lifecycle because, like what we talked about now is one from the email perspective and also fall into lifecycle marketing as well in some cases and so like what does it look like today in the best performing CS teams with the Tech Touch perspective?

[00:19:04] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, so, like as far as what you're saying is like when do they jump in like almost kind of like when is that human intervention.

[00:19:10] Andrew Michael: Yes. Sorry, not when is the human intervention, when and what touch points are. So you mentioned, like in-app messaging. I think that was something done maybe by product teams before, but now there's more CS teams getting with Tech Touch. The emails, there was life cycle marketing, but now there's more CS as well involvement in it. And so like what are the different stages and different ways that you're seeing CS interacting with a Tech Touch, the customers?

[00:19:34] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. I hate to say, ‘cause it is dependent on the organization, cause it has to do with, unfortunate… Unfortunately, like the politics, right, how, who has ownership of what? I would say you definitely have to understand, hopefully you're already within an organization, but if you're, let's say you're a newcomer coming in, just figuring out, like kind of who owns what. Personally, from what I've seen in this space, I have seen, because it also has to do with a lot of these solutions, right?

[00:19:59] Joe Di Grande: So such as Vitally, ChurnZero, Gainsight, they already have that technology and that capability to essentially, you know, do the in-app messaging, right? Your notification, not notifications, tips, right? Like if there's a question mark with a tip of what this feature is and so on, and they're able to kind of host that. Now the implementation side, from what I've seen most of the time, it's really still, product. Why? It's really because, again, they don't also want to mess anything up in their products, slow it down, so they're still gonna wanna have ownership because that's based on their KPIs and what they're responsible for.

[00:20:32] Joe Di Grande: But from the strategy side, I have seen an actual. Again, if they reside within a customer success operations department, which is typically who manages this, and then of course from a stakeholder, it's a VP of CS, they're still going to have this ultimate say, at least from the in-app. Where there is a blurred line, I think, in my opinion, is where marketing comes into play with digital CS, especially from that email standpoint. Because again, you are using very similar technology. The best way I would separate it though is really who's the actual sender? Meaning, is the automated messaging look like it's coming from a CSM or maybe that CS leader?

[00:21:13] Joe Di Grande: That probably should be owned by the customer success or customer success operations team. And that has a lot to do with the language that's gonna be spun up as far as they're closest to the business, we're marketing obviously, they have their own jargon and way of pitching things, which is great, it just might not be a fit from a personalization standpoint, right? We're personalizing at scale. That's the whole premise of it.

[00:21:36] Joe Di Grande: Although I have also worked in organizations with… where marketing, the same marketing ops person could work with CS, especially if they're smaller, in order to build out that automation, and then the actual body of emails and content is still owned by CS. So it could depend, but I would say familiarize yourself with the organization, how they work, who owns what, and then you could get a pretty good understanding of the delineation and go from there.

[00:22:03] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah, and I think that's speaking to it from, like, a team perspective of understanding like where there's, overlapping team. I think also what would be interesting to understand is like what are some of the different touch points that you see from a Tech Touch perspective? So we have like in-app messaging, be one. I've spoken recently as well to someone on the show where, that built in this like in-app training facility or whatever, where, or there was like, almost like an in-app community session where they had built out this community with their customers.

[00:22:32] Andrew Michael: And so what are some of the ways that you're seeing CS use tech to be able to upscale and leverage themselves better besides email and in-app? Are there any other areas where you're seeing interesting use cases of tech?

[00:22:45] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, what's interesting, that I've been starting to see a lot of myself and I've worked with customers as well is like an AI chatbot with these solutions and hosting it. I think it's pretty good in terms of, like queuing up and seeing if they need any assistance and then kind of leveraging that knowledge base. And of course, if we haven't talked about it already, you're gonna have a, if you're a technical solution and that's your offering, you need a knowledge base and make sure that's well built out. Once that's done, AI chatbot comes into play. And that again, creates that self-service element.

[00:23:14] Joe Di Grande: Communities in general, they're interesting. But there are also challenges with them because it's again, it's a whole different, it's a whole different environment. You kind of have to, it's almost an element of social media, right? Like as far as you monitoring and moderating and so on. As far as other channels though, I would say it's in-app. And again, if we talk about in-app messaging, I think it's like that sub bucket of AI messaging. So it's still within that category. Email is still going to be key though, because again, remember it's free for the most part. Obviously the technology you have to use to fire it off is not.

[00:23:48] Joe Di Grande: There are some free or freemium solutions. So you could, again, hacky ways of doing it. But I think it's definitely gonna be core. One thing that I would like to see a lot more, though, personally, is LinkedIn. I think customer success teams could actually take kind of like some advice from sales organizations because they're still talking to the same person that they're selling to in a lot of cases. And they're communicating via LinkedIn. I don't see a lot of CS teams. I've done it and encouraged my teams to make sure, especially for retention purposes, if we haven't heard back.

[00:24:19] Joe Di Grande: Sometimes you deal with email issues, right? Or maybe they left the organization. They just haven't updated their information. I think LinkedIn is definitely something that should be highly leveraged and should be also baked in into a lot of these CS platforms as well, when you're kind of building out your journey or your flow or cadence.

[00:24:37] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's a very interesting point because as soon as you mentioned that, immediately it triggered me like when they leave the company, the email bounces, but if you still have the connection via LinkedIn, you can sort of, first of all, understand where they're going to sell to them, where they go next. And they will see if there's a way to potentially like, get introductions before they end up leaving or at least pointed in the right direction. So I think, yeah, that's a great, great call out.

[00:25:00] Andrew Michael: I think it's also a little bit more personal as well as you mentioned, and you talked a little bit about personalization before, so I'm keen to understand a little bit about, like how personalization can be scaled in a Tech Touch environments, like obviously there's a lot of new and interesting, exciting tools now when it comes to AI. What are some of the interesting ways you're seeing like CS teams use technology to do personalization at scale?

[00:25:21] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, that's a great question. What I've seen in it's, it kind of goes back to the data and segmentation, I think, right? Like the first step, it's like obviously setting up your different buckets of people that you're reaching out to. But if you take it a step further, again, it goes back to like, this is a kind of V2, right? Like you get your bases and you prove the case of the business. What other data points are we tracking, and how can they be valuable?

[00:25:43[ Joe Di Grande: Some examples that I've done in the past, right? It's interesting, someone leaves the organization, right? You're gonna wanna make sure you're multi-threaded, especially if it's a larger account. So when that person leaves, you know, potentially, you're not reaching out on LinkedIn anyway, you could just figure out someone in your network, right? So in a particular example, I would go and reach out and look at different departments. Someone registers, they label their department, they label their title.

[00:26:08] Joe Di Grande: Maybe it's their particular country and you could actually even use dynamic fields and to embed that into the message to make it look like it's personalized. But again, you're thinking of it as a Mail Merge. It's cycling, you know, you're siphoning through that data and then that way it's cycling through like, hey, all right, I'm reaching out to X team within X region. I'm looking to support you with tracking, particularly use cases, this case for this product and see how it's going.

[00:26:35] Joe Di Grande: Bake that all in. Again, if it's clean, maybe you have to do it on a spreadsheet for, you know, do a data upload. But if you're dealing with a large enough audience, that work that can be invested into cleaning it up, it's well worth it. But I would say that's something that's still pretty simple and can be highly impactful in that case. And that's obviously going back to it. That was the example of, like finding more contacts, more influencers within an organization, but keeping them tailored. Say, Hey, I could support your team. I could support this region if the larger account. That's one. Good one that I've used.

[00:27:06] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. So like, as you're talking as well, it reminded me of a new tool that I've been playing around a little bit with, which is, I don't know if you've seen Clay.

[00:27:14] Joe Di Grande: Heard of it. I haven't.

[00:27:15] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So essentially, like, it's a very, very nice automation tool that allows you to do sort of like interesting research using LLMs and using enrichment data as well. So you can take an email address and the company domain, it can automatically enrich that data for you to understand like which industry they're in and so forth. And I can also do things like go and search LinkedIn and tell you how many product managers they have at that company, or you can use it to go check out the website and then tell you how many offices they have, and you can create a lot more personalized outreach from an SDR perspective there.

[00:27:48] Andrew Michael: But I think there's also interesting use cases, as you said, like in CS for some of these examples that you mentioned now, where you can actually go and do a lot more like interesting research about the company, you can have a listener that listens for any news mentions. And when a news mention comes in, you can say like, so you just got mentioned in XYZ news outlets, fantastic news, like teams growing. Do you need any support or assistance like with this growth?

[00:28:12] Andrew Michae: And yeah, so I think there's a lot of interesting ways now where we can sort of scale these really hyper-personalized outreach emails and have you seen, so one is email and that's interesting format, but have you seen an interesting use cases now, obviously like some of these newer video tools where you can create a clone of yourself and have you seen any of this done successfully yet? Because I feel like we're approaching something like that to be really, really good. But I don't know if that starts across the line. I've been like, creepy cross like, I'm personal even, if it ends up getting to that point.

[00:28:46] Joe Di Grande: So it's funny what I, I've actually have tested this in other organizations and it's tough because it's not scalable. Right? Like I used to send like, Vidyards. Hey, if we can do a Vidyard where it's like, Hey, my name is X. And then you just bake that into your campaign, right. Or a Loom video. Same thing. I have been seeing some of these videos where it could just make a clone of yourself. To be honest, I'm still at… me, personally, which is where I don't know enough about it in a sense to advise on it to a client yet. I have a little bit of that creepy factor. I'm watching a little bit too much of these Black Mirror shows on Netflix where, yeah. But I do think–

[00:29:23] Andrew Michael: A lot of it's coming true.

[00:29:24] Joe Di Grande: Oh, 100%. But I would say it's going to get to the point though where we're going to start to understand it more, learn more about it. I think it's going to be pretty impactful. I think also too, which is pretty crazy are, even, and this is, go to more of a sales lens, but the cold calling software is that, are out there. I think one's called Air. I was doing a little bit of investigating on, and it's a complete AI agent, you know, cold calling. So it's going to get there. It's going to take some time, but it's definitely the future for sure.

[00:29:51] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Cause I think, like the same thing with the email, it's almost probably like equally as it was not. It's the same thing, but it's seen as less creepy. I'd say because it's like it's email, it's text. When you start to like, impersonate the human form and the voice and things like it becomes a little bit more humanized. And I think that's when, like, it crosses that boundary. Is this really personal? Is this just like a creepy automation that I don't want? So I'm keen to see how it evolves in the next few things.

[00:30:20] Andrew Michael: So I definitely think, like, there is a space for it because I was recently, like working with the company as well. I'm looking at the book a sales call on the sites. And I was thinking to myself like, why do they even need to book a demo? Like, aren't they just, click a button and get a demo instantly? And like, what are some of the tools that are available to us? And like, how could we enable that?

[00:30:40] Andrew Michael: And I think we are definitely approaching, like a place, at least for something like that, where you can instantly get it and then have somebody step in at some point, but still feel personal and real and be able to answer questions. And yeah, it's going to be very interesting over the next few years to see how this evolves.

[00:30:55] Joe Di Grande: 100%.

[00:30:55] Andrew Michael: How we get closer to a Black Mirror of fates. Nice. So Joe, we're almost running out of time. So make sure I ask you a couple of questions I ask every guest. What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:31:11] Joe Di Grande: That's a good question. I honestly, that's the cliche, customers will churn. I think that's something that I learned in Tech Touch and we've built almost like a callous. Like at some point, right, like you have to kind of maximize the opportunity where the opportunity sits, right? If a customer has already gone and churn, we need to double down and make sure it doesn't happen again.

[00:31:31] Joe Di Grande: And it might have to let that one go, you know, and that kind of goes back to building that, that whole lifecycle. So I'd say like customers churn and it's okay, but just figuring out, like what mistake happened. And then also, too, sometimes customers aren't the right fit for the product either. And that's okay as well.

[00:31:46] Andrew Michael: Nice. The next thing is like, what's one thing that you wish more people would ask you, more customers would ask you that they don't ask enough?

[00:31:57] Joe Di Grande: I wish I wish they would say, instead of saying like, Hey, what tool could get the job done? Or it's more of like, Hey, what's really my problem? And can any of these tools get the job done? And most oftentimes I would say, Hey, let's actually build a strategy first, then actually focusing on a tool. I'd say that's, that'd be that.

[00:32:17] Andrew Michael: Nice. Very nice. Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. Is there any sort of final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Anything you'd like to share or how can they keep up to speed with your work?

[00:32:27] Joe Di Grande: Yeah, no, I think that was great chatting with you, Andrew. And yeah, if anybody wants to keep up with what I'm doing, they could check me out on LinkedIn or go to joedoestechtouch.com and catch me there. And I'm always happy for a coffee chat.

[00:32:42] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, thanks very much for joining, Joe. I wish you best of luck now going forward.

[00:32:46] Joe Di Grande: Awesome. Thank you, Andrew. Cheers.

[00:32:48] Andrew Michael: Cheers.

[00:32:56] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.FM. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:33:22] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.FM. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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