Leveraging the Jobs to be Done Framework for Customer Success

Daphne Costa Lopes

|

Head of Customer Success

of

HubSpot
EP
216
Daphne Costa Lopes
Daphne Costa Lopes

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Daphne Lopez, the Head of Customer Success at HubSpot.

In this episode, Daphne shares her experience in leveraging the Jobs to be Done framework in customer success. She explains how aligning customer success with product and marketing, and focusing on the value realization of customers' goals, can lead to better customer outcomes and retention.

We also discuss the importance of understanding anti-personas, refining ideal customer profiles, and how customer success teams can use the Jobs to be Done framework to drive renewals and meet evolving customer needs.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

On the Road: Jack Kerouac

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

Customer Success Expertise: Meet Daphne00:01:33
Aligning Product and CS: The Key Connection00:08:36
Jobs-to-be-Done Framework in CS00:13:05
Anti-Personas: Defining Who Not to Serve00:18:15
Adapting to Evolving Customer Needs00:19:17
Choosing the Right Job to Focus on00:22:07
Renewals: Navigating Changing Goals00:26:08
Change Management: The Retention Factor00:31:51

Transcription

00:00:00 Daphne Costa Lopes: My advice is if you have a year contract with a customer, is to have a midpoint check on those goals. So depending on how many conversations you're having, you know, if you're an enterprise, you might be talking to that customer every week. If you are in a smaller business, you might be talking to them every two months, every quarter. Whatever that is, whatever you call the touch points that you have with them and however often you have, I think the midmark of the contract is a really important one. You have time at the mid-mark to actually affect change. So if you're not meeting the customer's expectations at that point, you have time to recreate a plan, to gather, to find the resources to help that customer succeed before the renewal conversations start.

00:00:51 VO: How do you build a habit-forming products? And you saw this different… Don't just gun for revenue in the door.

00:00:56 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.

00:01:09 VO: How do you build a habit-forming products? 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 bootstrap, profitable, and growing.

00:01:22 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.

00:01:33 Daphne Costa Lopes: Hi, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited for our conversation.

00:01:37 Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. Daphne is the head of customer success at HubSpot, a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. Daphne is also the host of This Is Growth podcast and has helped scale ups in Fortune 500 businesses, build and scale global customer success teams to service over 100,000 customers. So my first question for you today is Daphne, when we were first chatting, I got a little bit of a tinge of an Irish accent, where are you based and perhaps where you're originally from as well?

00:02:06 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, you are right. I am based out of Dublin in Ireland, which is where HubSpot is headquartered in India. But I've been in Ireland for 14 years. I kind of finished uni, moved over. And it was one of those things where I was supposed to be here for a year or two. I was just exploring after college, just figuring out what I wanted to do. And this is now literally 14 years later, I'm still here. It's a great country. And it's... actually super similar to Brazil in so many ways, surprisingly. So yeah, Ireland is home.

00:02:40 Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's super interesting that it's similar to Brazil. I think one thing I really liked about Ireland visiting was just how friendly the people were. I found it and I was surprising because if you go a little bit further south and you go down to London, it's not the same sort of vibe that you get between these two big cities, but definitely interesting. And I noticed that you had that tinge of the Irish accent, so you've actually picked it up over the years as well since you've been there.

00:03:04 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, yeah, totally. It's hard not to. Irish accents are strong. And I remember my first day in Ireland, and I literally came out of the house that I was staying in, and I decided to get the bus to town. And I spoke English. I kind of grew up bilingual. But I got into the bus, and the bus driver said something to me, and I had no idea what he said. And I literally convinced myself that they spoke Irish in the buses. And I was like, "Okay, this is just like, it's Irish." Like I don't understand this. And when I came back to the house and I shared this experience with the people I was moving with. They were like, "No, the bus drivers speak English. What are you talking about?" And it was just his accent that I literally could not understand.

00:03:44 Andrew Michael: Yeah, it is. There's definitely some parts of the world where English doesn't sound like English at all, and it's very difficult to grasp. I myself as well, like my accents change completely. I grew up in South Africa. Like when I used to go back now and visit my friends in South Africa, they'd be like, "Why are you talking like that? It just sounds so weird." And it's like because it's become now this mix of English because I spend a lot of time with English. Obviously Cypriot's here in Cyprus where I'm based and then the original South African. But so today you're at HubSpot. Maybe you can just give us a little bit of an overview of what your role is there today and what it encompasses.

00:04:20 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, and so I had customer success for one of our regions in HubSpot, very specifically the UK and Ireland. And I joined HubSpot four years ago and since I joined, we have literally doubled in size. And that means that our CS org has grown up a lot. And my job is really to empower all of our managers and customer success managers to service the GNI market to help us grow and retain our customers, to drive usage and adoption. So depending on the day of the week, I wear very different hats depending on the market and the macro-environmental, depending on what our product is doing. So the job is very versatile, but the core of the job is making sure our customers stay with us, they see value with us, and then they grow.

00:05:14 Andrew Michael: Nice. And talking about jobs and value, today we had discussed that a great topic for us to be approaching would be the jobs to be done framework and value realization and how this is dealt with in the context of customer success. So maybe if you want to just give us a little bit of an overview of the framework and what it actually is.

00:05:36 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. And by the way, if you ever heard me speak, you probably have heard me talk about jobs to be done before. I feel like it's like my religion is my cult. I am a priestess of jobs to be done. And that's because I have a product background. And I definitely see the relationship between how we build products. Obviously, we're not building products for everyone everywhere without problems. We are very focused about what problems we're solving, what value we're creating. When I came into customer success about 10 years ago, value realization just wasn't something that people talked about. And it felt really disjoint how customer success teams talked about value just amongst themselves and also to customers, but also how they enable customers to see value.

00:06:24 Daphne Costa Lopes: So for example, success plans are something that I think a lot of customer success teams are familiar with. Some are using better than others, definitely. But success plans are pretty common playbooks in customer success. And the idea is that as soon as you get a customer into your book of business, whether it's coming from sales or it's coming from on-boarding or it's coming from another CSM, you have this shared document with customers where you define what are the goals that you have with our product and how are we going to work towards those goals? How do we know those goals have been met in terms of metrics? And how do we communicate those successes back to your business, back to our business? So it's the shared plan.

00:07:06 Daphne Costa Lopes: And to have a customer success plan that is different to your jobs to be done framework means that you literally have two different languages that are spoken inside the business which makes data analysis and tracking of leading indicators of value very difficult because your product team is talking one language and the customer success team is talking a different language. So I saw this gap when I first came into customer success and I've started this conversation a long, long time ago of making sure that we align tightly with product to understand what are the jobs that our customers want to do with our product and that we are best equipped to help them achieve, documenting what those are, making those the standard basis of everything that we do in customer success.

00:08:01 Daphne Costa Lopes: For example, the customer success plans, but also the usage metrics. When we're going to analyze what usage drives value, we need to start with a hypothesis of what value customers are looking to get and then what are the features, what are the years inside the product that drive that value. So I think that really connecting those dots between product and customer success is really important to just create a cohesive customer journey. And unfortunately, that is not the place where most customer success organizations are today.

00:08:36 Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's very interesting because it seems obvious, but it's not something that's come up very often on the show and this idea of combining the jobs to be done. And it is, it's used throughout most of the rest of the organization then as well. So you have like in marketing, your product marketers are typically working closely with products to define these jobs to be done. That goes back and then to the messaging and to the advertising that's done. So you're telling people on the outside world, Hey, like the... this is what our product is good for, this is the jobs that it solves for you and product, building a product for that. And then customer success gets on a call and just starts discussing a success plan in isolation of this.

00:09:13 Andrew Michael: So I think it makes total sense. The one thing that came to mind as well though, is like typically when these things are defined, they are defined by product or they are defined by product marketing and there's research that goes into it. At what stage should customer success be involved in this? Because obviously they're the front lines, they're speaking to customers continuously. How do you advise teams to start thinking about this approach and if maybe they're already doing jobs to be done in product and marketing, what should customer success be doing?

00:09:41 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, I think it really depends on the stage your organization is at, right? So the life cycle of the journey of the company. If you are a startup and you're still finding market fit and you're still defining jobs to be done, you're still defining what jobs have value for customers, what people are willing to pay for versus paying points that are, you know, just they're happy to live with. If you're in that stage where that is, let's say ambiguous and gray. Customer success can play a role of helping build that because we're getting really real feedback from customers who are willing to either go into a beta or pay for the product. And we can see firsthand, what are people trying to do when they come in? And taking that feedback and pushing it back to product to help build this vision of jobs to be done. I think that stage is a huge value add that customer success teams can bring. And I think this is about creating feedback, back loops between product and customer success and making it easy to exchange information.

00:10:47 Daphne Costa Lopes: Then I think if you were later in your journey, if you're more like a scale up type of business and you have already consolidated your jobs to be done, I think that if you're not using NCS today, the key thing there is to align and learn from the product team, from product marketing, from marketing, what are those jobs and why have we chose them? And how customers are speaking about them. And then what are the features that we have created that tie back to that use case and that job and really build our playbooks of usage and adoption based on those use cases and those jobs to be done and really educate customer success managers on that. And if you don't have ways of measuring it, I think that's another place where customer success can really be advocates of helping communicate value to customers and help product prioritize getting the data important for our customers. We hear a lot about how our customers have to show value to their own businesses. So we can really hone in into what kind of metrics would be valuable.

00:11:50 Daphne Costa Lopes: And then if you are a Fortune 500 company, you have hundreds of thousands of customers and you are only now looking at jobs to be done, your customer base is obviously very mature and you'll be known in the market for some of the things that you do. I think it's about also bringing innovation in. It's like how our customers are changing. And it's almost like you go back to that startup phase, but in a different level of maturity, you are hearing what customers are saying, what they're doing, what pointing time solutions that they are buying in order to solve for problems that your product doesn't solve yet, what integrations they're interested in. And then again, bringing that information back to product and being advocates to continue building upon the jobs to be done framework that's already there.

00:12:36 Daphne Costa Lopes: But ultimately, I think that alignment across the organization between product, sales, marketing, and customer success, I think jobs should be done as a really valuable place to anchor that and to really truly be customer centric that we are all speaking the language of the customer. What is the customer trying to do? How do we all align our jobs and our responsibilities, whether that's communication, value realization. How do we align our responsibility to what our customers want to see from us?

00:13:05 Andrew Michael: Absolutely. It's such a powerful framework and having everybody working towards from the same playbook, I think is extremely valuable and useful. And especially as well when it comes to creating those relationships between departments and being able to feed feedback in and being able to understand, okay, what are the things we should be caring about in these conversations? And what are some of the things that we should be feeding back to products? And what's perhaps like outside of our focus, who are our anti-personas maybe, and even in this case, and it just helps give you a really good framework to focus. I'm interested though, maybe could you give us a really, really practical example, maybe pick a HubSpot or another company and what the jobs to be done looks like, what does it actually mean? Cause you hear this all the time, you hear jobs to be done, but in practical terms, what is it?

00:13:55 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think I'll use HubSpot as an example. HubSpot is a CRM platform and one of the components of HubSpot is a marketing automation tool, right? And anybody buying a marketing automation tool oftentimes has one job that they want to do, which is demand generation. They want to create more leads, more qualified leads. So if the job is to generate qualified leads. And again, we have personas that I love that you touched on, on anti personas and we can get back to that because it's really a really valuable concept for CS as well. But if you think about the job to be done off the marketing persona that we have, if that is generating marketing qualified leads, then in terms of building playbooks, a customer success manager can then match the customer with that job to be done and say, okay, you want to generate qualified leads. Here are the processes. that this is the strategies that we recommend with our product.

00:14:56 Daphne Costa Lopes: Do they resonate with that business and how they do marketing, how they gather qualified leads? Are they, for example, running email campaigns? Are they doing webinars? Are they using advertising? There's many tactics that will play into that job. And it's about having a menu of strategies for customers that are trying to fix that job and generate more leads for their business. And then once a customer success manager is applying those strategies with customers to help them generate more marketing qualified leads, then it's about measuring. Are we doing that? Is our customer base generating more qualified leads over time? Can we see that growth? Creating alert systems, intelligent alert systems, when a customer level of marketing qualified leads is either dropping, what do you do there? How do customer success managers act on the back of seeing that leading indicator go down. How are you performing against your peers, like industry benchmarks?

00:15:55 Daphne Costa Lopes: So if you are like HubSpot, a lucky company to have hundreds of thousands of customers, you can have very powerful first party data where you can look at, okay, here's all the customers that look like you. They're in your industry, they're of your customer size and in your region, et cetera. And how are they performing on their marketing qualified leads? And where do you sit in this? Are you the top percentile? Are you smashing this? And can you communicate that to your team and say, look at how well we're doing? Or is there room for growth? And can you learn? Can you be connected with our communities to learn how other people are doing this? Could you be leveraging tools and services that other people are maybe leveraging that you're not? Can you take on courses? So really tying in that metric then to behavior, how do we drive behavior that will improve that leading indicator that is the creating marketing qualified leads.

00:16:52 Daphne Costa Lopes: And one of the things that we hear a lot, especially in HubSpot with this thing of marketing qualified leads is, okay, the job should be done is the same, but people's expectations are very different. So, you know, I have a business I want to generate, you know, I want to grow by 20%. That means a certain number of qualified leads that success for me. Another business might want to go by 50% and another business might want to go by 2%. Those are all very different ambitions. I think that customer success managers can get stuck in that zone of saying it's hard to compare customers because they are performing at such different levels.

00:17:31 Daphne Costa Lopes:  However, I think that one thing is the customer target that they might have. But that target doesn't change the job and it doesn't change the strategies that you apply. It only changes the intensity to which you use those strategies and the resources that you put behind and the investments that you make. So I think that's like taking that view of, okay, the job to be done of the marketing tools to generate qualified leads. Here's the menu of strategies. What are the ones that the customer is using and picking to use? What resources do they have? And then monitoring and tracking to see is it working? Is it changing? Is it moving the needle? Or are they getting worse? And then how do we drive behavior on the back of that?

00:18:15  Andrew Michael: And the playbooks have grown with it. Yeah, I think it's key to understand as well, like as you mentioned, in HubSpot's case, it's marketing automation. The job to be done is not to automate marketing, which you might think. The job to be in really is what is the actual value that the customer needs to realize. And they're coming to your tool because they want to generate more leads. They don't want to save time like sending X to Y and maybe cut a few steps. It's really about like, how can we bring new business in the door? Because ultimately that's what they're paying for.

00:18:46  Andrew Michael: And then as you mentioned as well, just going through that throughout the funnel, just realizing, okay, if this is the end goal, how do we measure that? How do we know that we're delivering value? And it gives you a very good way and indicated to understand, okay, are they extracting the value that they expect from our product or service? Another framework I really liked looking at as well in the same lines of this around is a customer likely to churn is you can do a nice four by four matrix where you can look at the price they pay for your service, which is either in money or time that they need to invest and then the value they're extracting.

00:19:17  Andrew Michael: So in your case, you mentioned in HubSpot, like how many leads are they receiving? How much are they paying? And then you can generally start to see who are churn risks, perhaps who's an opportunity to monetize even further and putting this in a nice little four by four matrix, you can really quickly see how healthy is your overall user base. But going back, it really needs to start with what is the job to earn? What is the value that they're really trying to extract from the product? Very nice. You mentioned you wanted to go back and circle back to Anti-personas. What are your thoughts on them? And maybe if you can just give a quick overview of what they are as well.

00:19:51 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. Anti-personas, I think it's such an interesting concept. And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this specific terminology in customer success. But what I hear a lot is people talking about ideal customer profiles, right? So the anti persona is literally the opposite of your ideal customer profile. They are the people that you do not want to be servicing with your product. Maybe because they don't have the right resources, maybe because they are not going to be able to see the value that you provide, even though they can use different parts of your product. So it's really defining what is the antithesis of your ideal customer profile.

00:20:34 Daphne Costa Lopes: What I think is really interesting, especially as your company grows, is you evolve. Your ideal customer profile evolves, which means that some customers that used to fit or close approximation of your ideal customer profile at the start or last year or three years ago, next year they might not be. It's really important for us to actually be able to undocumented ideal customer profile, but continuously look and refine who are the people who are… who fall out of that. And as we evolve our understanding of an ideal customer profile, then over time, like how do we map and measure the personas that no longer fall into that so that we can decide how we invest our resources, how we identify risk, where do those customers live in our segmentation strategy and all of that.

00:21:27 Andrew Michael: Yeah. I love them as well from even earlier in the funnel, like understanding from a sales perspective, like who should we be selling into. Sort of if you, if the sales team understands, okay, these are the anti-personas, like we don't want to spend our time and energy, perhaps even like in terms of compensation plans, not being comped for the neg, the anti-personas you end up getting much better quality customer coming through the door and in focus. And it's a nice concept that does all help, like prioritize feature requests better. And as you said, it's the inverse of the ICP, but it just gives you a fresh way of viewing it and understanding, okay, like, oh, we might get a lot of requests for this, but in actuality, like these requests are just chewing up a lot of our time and energy and it's something we don't want to be focused on.

00:22:07 Andrew Michael: The next thing I was interested as well is like in the context of jobs to be done, like typically it's jobs. We spoke about one job in HubSpot's case, but there are cases where there are multiple jobs that the customer is hiring your product for. And how do you go about then deciding and in the context of customer success, like what job you should be focusing on with your customer? What does that process look like trying to figure that out?

00:22:33 Daphne Costa Lopes: I think it's different depending on whether you are talking about scale or you're talking about high touch customer success. I think in high touch customer success, this discussion about jobs starts in the sales process. What are the reasons why the customer is buying your product and then being able to transition  that information from sales all the way to customer success. And like I said, build those customer success plans with the customer alongside them in partnership with them. And knowing that internally you have a menu of jobs to pick and in HubSpot we have many jobs too. So you have a menu of jobs to pick. Maybe your customer is going to give you a job that isn't on that menu on the things that the product team has defined. But that's really interesting information, right?

00:23:20 Daphne Costa Lopes: One, you can learn from that. You can share that feedback that it's useful for our marketing, it's useful for our product teams. But equally, it's also important to really focus on what are the things that we're good at? What are the things that we can measure and guide customers? In so many ways, customers come to you with maybe an art of the future, art of the possible picture, but they don't know how to funnel it down and really define what are the goals? What are the values? And I think that's where a customer success manager in the high touch segment can lend a lot of expertise is actually by guiding without like I said without being so close that you don't hear new jobs that come from the customer and that you're not able to pass on that information. Sometimes you have to be creative as well on how you measure those new jobs that customers want to do with you.

00:24:11 Daphne Costa Lopes: However at scale you have way less of that back-and-forward conversation about refining the picture of what jobs are etc. And I think that that's where you take in one firmographic data, persona data, and you look at customer behavior in your product. So if you are following the journey of a customer that's in either product-led motion or scale motion, what you want to do is over time you want to collect more and more and more information to refine their profile and understand and assume what their jobs to be done are. And maybe create points in the product where you can validate that. You can collect that information directly from customers.

00:24:54 Daphne Costa Lopes: So your idea is maybe like a good comparison is what social media does to all of us. They're consistently profiling us based on our behaviors. That's at scale what we want to do to our customers. We want to continuously profile them based on how they're using the results that they're getting, the information that they're giving us. And assume what those jobs should be doing, make hypotheses, see if those hypotheses are true and then continue to refine that.

00:25:22 Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think, as you mentioned, there's very big distinction between the high touch and low touch and what you can and can't do as well and high touch. It's a lot easier sort of to get that feedback and understand how you can work with the customer to get there. The other thing I think that's interesting as well is that when you think about the context of training retention and jobs to be done, typically as well, like when somebody first comes to your product, they have a specific set of jobs and goals to achieve. And as their maturity grows, as their understanding of the market grows, those jobs to be done tend to change as well. And they tend to have more sophisticated requests and understanding. And how can customer success teams use this understanding as well of the market when they start thinking about renewals, especially when we look at yearly contracts?

00:26:08 Andrew Michael: Perhaps at renewal, the same goals and issues were not the same as previous. And if I can give an example, like with segment previously, we were at [inaudible], we chose them as a provider because we had a mess with our data. We needed to have a much cleaner format to be able to send it to all our tools. And that was the initial goal was just to be able to send data clearly to all the different tools. But then a year into the goal, we had achieved that. Like the job to be done had been met, was continuously being met, but we had more sophisticated needs for the downline. So how should a CSM be thinking about these?

00:26:44 Daphne Costa Lopes: This is such a great question, because I think there is an element of customers growing and maturing, but there's also so many other things that happen inside companies. And I think COVID, for example, is a good example of that. Everyone's priorities changed during that time in terms of business. They shifted resources from one place to the other. So we cannot assume that what we heard three months ago, six months ago, a year ago is where customers are today. And I think that again, on a high touch motion, you have the room to have more conversations about this and continuously revisit. Okay, here's a success plan we defined. And this is the things that we said we're going to do. Here's where we're at. We've achieved them and having the business review sessions to really map new goals and new strategies and how that business is evolving.

00:27:37 Daphne Costa Lopes: However, on the scale business, it's much harder to do that. In the scale business, again, you have to, based on the behavior that you see from customers, based on the results that they see, based on the benchmarks that you see against the industry, against the cohort of customers that look like them, you have to make assumptions on whether they are progressing in the way that they should be. I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive, by the way. I think a lot of people have this binary view of customer success. It's either like we have the scale motions or the high touch motions, but I think the high touch motions can benefit a lot from the data insights and the intelligence that you get from these large machine learning models to help guide those conversations.

00:28:22 Daphne Costa Lopes: And my advice is if you have a year contract with a customer, is to have a midpoint check on those goals. So depending on how many conversations you're having, you know, if you're an enterprise, you might be talking to that customer every week. If you are, you know, in a smaller business, you might be talking to them every two months, every quarter. Whatever that is, whatever you call the touch points that you have with them and however often you have, I think the mid-mark of the contract is a really important one. You have time at the mid-mark to actually affect change. So if you're not meeting the customer's expectations at that point, you have time to recreate a plan, to gather, to find the resources to help that customer succeed before the renewal conversations start.

00297:10 Daphne Costa Lopes: And if the customer is doing really well, and they are flying on their goals, again, you have an opportunity to set new, bigger, more ambitious goals together with your customer to expand their usage. Because actually, if you don't do that, your competitor will. Another company is going to come in and target your customers and say, you know, you're doing all these cool things. Have you thought about this other thing? So like really having those conversations, whether the customer is healthy or whether the customer might be struggling in some areas. That midpoint, I think, is that it's a really, really critical conversation. And it has to happen with the right people.

00:29:49 Daphne Costa Lopes: And again, a lot of customer success managers might be having a conversation with a business user that, you know, a power user in that tool. If you're not talking to the decision makers, if you're not talking to the executive sponsors, the people who have visibility on the company's strategy, on the expectations of the business, then you are probably missing an opportunity to delight that customer to refer to value because you're kind of pigeonholed in that almost individual contributor view of the platform that you're providing.

00:30:19 Andrew Michael: Yeah. And it's very interesting as all the, as you said, like that mid-year mark is a good point where you have the opportunity to still change course and to fix things for customers. And in the sense of sort of like, when things are going extremely well, you can be a lot more ambitious then, and when things aren't going as well, then you can sort of change course and figure out. So it's this idea of like, understanding what the jobs to be done on, understanding what they're trying to achieve at any given moment is really important because you can then understand how your product can be used to meet those needs. And especially those evolving needs as they change over time from their customer. I'm interested, Daphne, what's one thing that you know today about channel retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

00:31:04 Daphne Costa Lopes: I think I underestimated the role of change management in the process of retaining customers or the reasons for them to leave. When I first started customer success, it was all about like ship the right features, put them in front of the customers, and they will come, they will use them. And the reality, especially as you start working with more enterprise software, more sophisticated customers, is that that is not enough. You need to help customers navigate change. Whether it's through your communities, your content, meetings that you have, or partners that you bring into the business to help drive digital transformation to your customers, top leadership. There are many that, but one thing you cannot do is ignore that.

00:31:51 Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's super interesting that as well, something very often overlooked. And I think, especially in the early days for early stage startups, when you build your first product, you ship it, you send it out, and then nobody starts using it. And then you start wondering why. Like there's so much work that really goes into that onboarding. And especially at the enterprise stage, as you mentioned, that change management. So many people are so used to working a specific way, trying to introduce something new. Changing user behavior is probably one of the hardest types of changes to make. So I can definitely see as well the point you're making there. And it's a super important one to understand and not overlook.

00:32:27 Andrew Michael: Well, Daphne, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? Like anything they should be aware of to give up to speed with your work?

00:32:53 Daphne Costa Lopes: Yeah. I mean. I think the best place to find me is LinkedIn. I post stuff all the time in there. Many thoughts. I've been talking a lot about multi-touch attribution. I know this is a topic that you covered here as well. I think it's an incredible concept that we have to borrow from marketing. I'm passionate about ensuring that we're focusing on doing the right things at the right time to drive value for customers. So yeah, so if you want to hear me ramble about multi-touch attribution for the next three months, please follow on LinkedIn. I also write a newsletter weekly for customer success leaders that are looking to implement CS strategies that goes out every Friday. So if you want to join, it's on daphnelopez.com. And yeah, I'm also on the podcast only once a month. But they're interesting conversations, usually with people that build really successful careers and customer success. Very focused on the topic of career building in CS.

00:33:29 Andrew Michael: Amazing. For the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick those up there. And yeah, just thanks again so much for joining Daphne. It's been a pleasure having you today and wish you best of luck.

00:33:38 Daphne Costa Lopes: Thank you so much, Andrew. It's been a pleasure.

00:33:40 Andrew Michael: Cheers. Bye.

00:33:43 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. 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 at 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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Daphne Costa Lopes
Daphne Costa Lopes
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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