Why Brian threw out the notion of customer journey maps and replaced it with a behaviour mapping exercise to increase retention.

Brian LaFaille

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Global Head, Customer Success Strategic Programs

of

Google
EP
103
Brian LaFaille
Brian LaFaille

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Brian LaFaille, Global Head, Customer Success Strategic Programs at Google.

In this episode, we talked about how Brian is navigating customer retention post the Google acquisition, how both Google and Looker benefited from joining forces, and how they managed and prepared their existing customers for the transition.

We also discussed Looker’s explosive growth since joining Google, and why Brian threw out the notion of customer journey maps and replaced it with a behaviour mapping exercise. Brian also shares the one thing he learned about churn and retention that he had a different perspective on before joining Google.


Fighting Churn with DataOV Build

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

What it’s like working remotely at Google, a company famous for their amazing office environment. 00:02:13
So what is Google Cloud. 00:04:20
What has been the biggest benefit for Looker joining Google Cloud. 00:06:16
Looker’s explosive growth since joining Google and how’s the team dealing with it. 00:11:59
Why Brian threw out the notion of customer journey maps and replaced it with a behaviour mapping exercise. 00:17:42
What's one thing Brian learned about churn or retention that's he had a different perspective on before joining Google. 00:23:10
What Brian would do to help a company turn its churn rate around in 90 days. 00:26:31

Transcription

Andrew Michael: [00:00:00] Hey, Brian. Welcome to the show.

Brian LaFaille: [00:00:02] Hey Andrew. Thanks for having me back.

Andrew Michael: [00:00:04] It's a pleasure for the listeners. Brian is the global head of customer success, strategic programs at Google and founder of the customer success field guide. Prior to Google Brian held the same role at Looker away, help check the customer success practice from scratch over the five years he spent there before their acquisition by Google for $2.6 billion.

We previously hosted  Brian on  the show at the time of the acquisition about a year ago. And we're lucky to have him back today to share his experience navigating customer attention, post the acquisition. So my first question for you, Brian, is what's it like working remotely, a Google from a company famous for the amazing office environments?

Have they both the same experience for remote work.

Brian LaFaille: [00:00:43] So it's quite interesting because the Looker team when we were acquired, I think we might've been the last batch of employees that was onboarded in person. So we actually got to go in we were at the mountain view campus and wherever people were in the world, they went to their regional Google [00:01:00] offices and we got to have our Noogler hats, the little twirling hats that everybody gets that.

So we got to go through that kind of really special onboarding experience. And I'm, we're all very fortunate for that because I think it set us up for a good foundation to go from there and just, I think it was about a week later the country shut down and, Google has been an incredible company to work for.

They've been incredibly accommodating. In the resources that they've been providing all remote employees since then, for instance, they've been, giving budget for everybody to work from home expensing, certain things that you're doing at the office, internet, electricity, things like that. And so it's been an incredible experience recently.

We actually just completed our annual kickoff that was done purely remotely. And within the Google cloud segment that encompasses somewhere North of 25,000 employees. And it was done with recorded sessions and breakouts and networking. And you have to just imagine the creativity that comes to Google.

They did an excellent job [00:02:00] in facilitating a wonderful kind of digital kickoff event.

Andrew Michael: [00:02:04] Yeah. 25,000 people to facilitate networking sounds intimidating, especially online as well, where these events typically held in person before.

Brian LaFaille: [00:02:14] They were. So you could imagine these big, massive kind of a kickoff of idioms.

We did the last one in Las Vegas. And so if you were a part of the Google cloud team in December of 2019 going into January 20, 20, yeah. They rented out, basically all of Las Vegas, they'd rented out the biggest conference halls. I think at that point, Google cloud was probably about 20,000 employees strong and it is the fastest growing segment.

Both in terms of revenue growth and employee count within Google, it's a major investment that, that Google is making as one of their big bets.

Andrew Michael: [00:02:47] And what does it entail? Exactly. So what is Google cloud?

Brian LaFaille: [00:02:51] Yeah, Google cloud is all of the services and infrastructure and storage and compute.

It's all of the services that Google, Google [00:03:00] runs a lots of products for billions of users. Every year you think about Gmail or maps or Google payments, any of these number of services. And so underlying all of these services that are serving, billion plus users every year is infrastructure.

And Google cloud, a couple of years back said, we've basically built these infrastructure components to serve our own needs. YouTube, for instance, how do we serve billions of users and tens of billions of views each and every month, and knowing that they had built a very unique kind of tech stack, they started to say we can actually start to provide this as a service.

And that's where they started to open up a Google cloud as a division within Google. And I'm not exactly clear when it was built as a division within Google, but it goes back a couple of years and it encompasses both the infrastructure, which is very kind of consumption oriented as a service.

And then you've got the SaaS components, which are the things like Looker, which is the division I'm in Chronicle, which is their security. Apogee, which is their API [00:04:00] management and then workspace, which is, they all have, Google meet, Google drive, all of this products that is in kind of the collaboration suite for Google.

And so all in, like I said, it's about, 25,000 employees and growing very quickly.

Andrew Michael: [00:04:11] And it must be in a super interesting time as well, like coming over from Looker. What size was the team at that point when you were acquired? How many were you in looking at. Looker was

Brian LaFaille: [00:04:20] about a thousand employees.

And in, in terms of ARR, we were only about 200 or so million in annual recurring revenue. Now that's a, a lot of growth that I'd seen when I joined, we had 2 million of ARR. So to see it grow to that point was incredible. However, when you think about Google cloud, it is a multi-billion dollar business.

And we're one small drop in a very large pond.

Andrew Michael: [00:04:41] Why would you say then as being like the biggest benefit now for Looker joining Google cloud?

Brian LaFaille: [00:04:47] Yeah. Th th the key benefits I think, go both. Wait. So I think Looker brings a very interesting and unique product to the Google cloud portfolio of products, specifically.

It compliments the big query database platform, [00:05:00] amazingly well. If a company or a customer or a Google cloud customer decides to centralize all of their company's data and make the investment in a cloud data warehouse like big query Looker becomes the kind of, front end that users can take advantage of that database.

And so I think that the acquisition made sense on a product level, just, 10 times out of 10 on the culture front, I think that Looker brought this, if you look at our G2 crowds just online or anywhere on the web, you'll see that we have amazing customer satisfaction scores and we lead with customer empathy.

And so while I think it made sense from a product perspective, Google has this very kind of user first culture and that meshed very well with with Google and Looker. And so we were able to bring that kind of empathy into Google cloud, and there's a lot of synergies there. And so I think it made sense both on the culture front, but also on the product front.

Andrew Michael: [00:05:50] Nice and making this move then as well. I think at the time could imagine there must've been a little bit of worry as well, like specifically, like for customers coming, maybe from [00:06:00] different data stacks, not using Google, like there must've been concerns. What does this mean for me now using Looker and maybe I'm on something like AWS or How did you manage the transition period with these customers and with customs in general?

What is the communication like with customers? Like how did you prep them for those about to happen?

Brian LaFaille: [00:06:18] Yeah, I, there was a period of time that we had to kind of plan for that communication. When Google signed the intent to acquire us we already were spinning up tiger teams to focus on communications, to existing customers.

Again, we are very customer first and customer forward, and so we want it to be as open and honest and direct with our customers as possible. And leading up to the acquisition, we were preaching the number of. Unique databases that we were supporting. We want it to be cloud agnostic and that still stands true today.

We still support, Amazon's Redshift or Microsoft Azure, or just a, my SQL database that you're running somewhere else on prem. It doesn't matter to us. And I think that, this coordinated very nicely with [00:07:00] Google's announcement last year. At their next conference. And they announced this new platform called , which is meant to be a multi-cloud cloud kind of agnostic approach to running, loads on lots of different clouds.

And it, it helped that Google was preaching this messaging of kind of an open cloud. That any customer could use any cloud that they want. And Looker also had that approach and that philosophy. And so as we got into the kind of the specifics of communications to customers we decided to be upfront.

And we said, look, we are not going to stop supporting any of these databases that we currently support. We support 50 plus dialects in the data space. And that is going to continue. And we reiterated the message. You can imagine. There were some larger customers though, that had a heavy investment in AWS and they have investment in Looker and there was some tension and we needed to meet that with kind of executive presence to say, look like we're invested here.

And we had our executives, at the time early 20, 28, we were going to send them on planes to go meet with these customers in person. [00:08:00] Couldn't do that. So the next best alternative was to have zoom calls with all of our largest customers that might have been on a different platform, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera.

Andrew Michael: [00:08:08] And just to ease them into it and let them know, like nothing's really going to change you at the same experience.

Brian LaFaille: [00:08:12] Exactly. Exactly.

Andrew Michael: [00:08:14] What would you say has changed for your customers though, since joining is there any sort of things that have got better or maybe worse as a result of the acquisition?

Brian LaFaille: [00:08:21] I'd like to think that the entire experience has gotten better.

Th the benefit of being the Looker department within Google is you get vast amounts of resources that we didn't previously have as a private company. You can think about, Google cloud is known for It's learning tracks and it's learning journeys and it's certification program.

And I think that Google cloud has actually done one of the best jobs in the market about getting people certified. We've got millions of people across the globe that are getting certified on Google cloud products. And you can take all of that knowledge and that mastery into education and learning and development space.

And you now have all of those resources as it look or division. And so that allows [00:09:00] us to improve our certification program, our learning journeys. But then it also extends into the product as well. So where we previously were loosely partners with Google cloud and loosely partnered with AWS.

Now that we're within the Google ecosystem, we're able to iterate and build cloud Google cloud, native API APIs directly into Looker. That makes it easier. So for instance natural language processing. You think about it with your group, Google home, right? There's an entire team that knows how to take natural language and translate it into actual kind of results or search queries.

You can take that exact same type of approach and apply it to Looker, for instance. So if I wanted to be able to say, Hey, with a Google home, that's in your office, show me today's sales results. It w it would be able to interpret that that language, and then turn it into an actual query that would show up on your dashboards.

And so I think it allows us to move much more quickly. You could also imagine if you're trying to plot, map data. Google maps is one of the best APIs in the world. So we're able to improve the product and Uplevel the product while also [00:10:00] offering lots of different components to the Looker experience that we didn't previously have as a private company.

So learning journeys, for instance,

Andrew Michael: [00:10:06] Yeah. And one of the things I think we chatted about before the show was that you've actually seen explosive growth since joining Google. And how has that been like for you and the team as well? I think I can imagine as well, like being introduced to thousands of new customers and trying to keep up and scale the processes maybe that you had in place for them previously.

What's that journey been like now since joining Google?

Brian LaFaille: [00:10:30] Yeah, I, we were seeing, you know, double digit growth quarter over quarter for new logo acquisition prior to Google. And to give a little bit of context, the Looker sales team was probably about 500 strong. So we had about a thousand employees. Half of that was about sales.

When you get into the Google cloud ecosystem, though, the sales org within Google cloud is tens of thousand strong. Globally in every region, every geo you know, every different segment. And you can [00:11:00] imagine if every one of those account executives sells just one Looker deal, just one. That would, 10 X our customer base.

And so we, we noticed that, we saw this massive kind of wave of new customers that was coming in. And that's part of the reason why I stepped over into programs is to help understand what are the cracks in our current customer process that are going to be exacerbated when we start adding just all of these new logos.

And the interesting and unique challenge is that, we've gone from, double digit growth up to triple digit growth quarter on quarter. Which is insane. You never see this type of acceleration. I think that we're also riding the momentum from just cloud adoption as everybody's moved to the digital world in the busy business life and otherwise.

But we had to basically rethink how we serve customers because we were both simultaneously going up market. We were being exposed to larger deals. We'd never seen in size before, but then we also were being exposed to other Google cloud customers that were on the smaller SMB, digital, native [00:12:00] front.

And that, that led to that kind of triple digit growth. And we needed to really rethink how we go to market with customer success and we're still working through it, but we're really leading with digital success first. Layering and CSMs were absolutely makes sense. And we're trying to embellish and improve the cost of customer experience that way.

Andrew Michael: [00:12:18] Yeah, that must be pretty intense. So I'm trying to figure that all out in the partial a little bit more hands-on would you say a more high touch team and now you're making a switch more to low touch and unlikely to only where it's really necessary introducing CSM? Is that the,

Brian LaFaille: [00:12:31] yeah, I think w the way that we're thinking about it is leading with digital.

We understand that, having digital channels improves the overall customer experience, it doesn't take away from the CSM experience. But I think that where it makes sense either, customers that have paid for, success. Or they have some sort of really complex use case.

That's atypical of Looker and there's a need or a customer is growing very rapidly. We want to be more selective in how we apply CSM resourcing. And it [00:13:00] has really forced us to be critical of our segmentation. Because previously it might've just said, Hey. 20 new customers that goes to a CSM in this new region.

All right off you go. But I think that this sort of growth has forced us to really think about, what value can the CSM add in that particular customer engagement. And if the actual needs of the customer can be met through digital channels and they can move more quickly than saying, have a weekly meeting with the CSM, all they need maybe, or some docs and some webinars and some videos and things like that.

And they can move to, to implement Looker. We don't want to get in their way. And so it's forced us to rethink how we do segmentation.

Andrew Michael: [00:13:34] Nice. And then the thing as well, like I'm thinking about this then would be the team and the structure and who's on board. And I think maybe in this new future, then digital first the skill set required and the team within the CSM may need to change, but also she may be since the rapid growth, he's still going to need the volume of CSM managers to be able to support the growth, but then also be hiring.

More digital first customer success thinkers. Is that the plan or,

[00:14:00] Brian LaFaille: [00:14:00] yeah roughly, we have a, 50 plus CSMs on the team and, I think that what we're doing is we're reallocating. Many of those CSMs. To the larger and larger deals that we're seeing come through with GCP.

But then that also forces us to go on the lower end of the spectrum for the digital native type companies that are SMB likely under a hundred K in spend annually. Those are the customers that we need to kind of service with digital channels. And that is forcing us to actually look at what are the other roles that we need to fill.

Marketing PR potentially or copywriting or, graphics and digital. Those are the kinds of roles that we need to bolster up on the customer success team. And in many instances, we actually have resources within other departments. So it's forcing us to really think about our partnerships with other teams.

So strengthening the relationship we have with marketing, for instance, to really ensure that we can run strong webinars that are adding value to customers, or, work with our brand team about how we put out new ink infographics or PDFs or one-pagers th that is really, how we're bolstering our [00:15:00] skills across the team, and then repurposing a lot of our CSMs to focus on the really large strategic customer implementations.

Andrew Michael: [00:15:07] And then focusing is they're bringing in marketing, lifecycle, marketing, getting campaigns running, like a lot of automation behind the scenes. And that's also like interesting. I think that moving more in this direction then you said if they can get on with it, just getting out of their way do it.

And I think that's great. The one thing that like, in my mind, just thinking through this as well and how it plays out, is that okay? When you have a lot more hands on experience, like with CSM and having that personal touch, you can gauge where the customer's at and no, have a better idea if they're going to be successful or not.

I know as well, like in a previous episode where we had Eleanor friend from segment, one of the interesting things when we chatted with her was actually. Adding friction to onboarding increased retention for them because what they realize is customers are just went on and got on with their thing, ended up setting, maybe the tool up in a non-ideal way.

So then they couldn't get the best access to the service. And that ended up causing [00:16:00] churn at the, or the other end. So what, how are you thinking about measuring engagement at the stage from a CSM perspective to know when you should maybe step in or shouldn't as a team and when to allocate resources to an account?

Brian LaFaille: [00:16:13] Yeah, but this speaks to an initiative that's been underway since January of 2020. So when I stepped into the program's role, we decided to completely rethink the way that we were doing customer journey mapping. We threw out the notion of customer journey maps what we had seen and what we had internally was the customer journey map was something that was very internally facing deal, closes handoff to CSM kickoff.

It's all the things that we care about. And it wasn't focused on the customer and it also was not data-driven whatsoever, and these were triggered events that happened manually and we decided to throw that model completely out. And we said let's instead start with a behavior mapping exercise.

And we actually took inspiration from our product team about this, how to users navigate through the product. So we got a cross-functional working team together at [00:17:00] our kickoff last year in Q1 of 2020. And this cross-functional working team, customer marketing, customer success. Product marketing support, professional services.

And we decided to think through what are the actual user behaviors that a customer needs to exhibit in order to be successful in order for them to renew? What does that behavior journey look like? And this behavior mapping exercise is something that it's, it doesn't look like a customer journey map because there's two things that make it unique.

The first is these behaviors are time-bound. So we understand in the first month or in the second month, we would expect X, Y, and Z behaviors to be exhibited in the product. And the second thing is all of these behaviors are quantifiable. And that allows us to scale that allows us to look at these customer behaviors over time and see, Hey, these customers have not connected their database in the first week, or they have not started issuing get commits against they're looking on model for instance, in the first month.

And those are early indicators of a customer that's going off the rails very early. . And that [00:18:00] entire motion allowed us to say now that we have a line in the sand as to what a good customer looks like and what the behavior map looks like over time, we can develop digital channels to influence those behaviors.

But if those digital channels don't resonate, which they don't always do, right? Some customers do need to have that one-to-one human experience to be inspired to actually drive action within their company. That's where we can get CSMs involved. And so we lead with the digital channels and all the campaign development that goes out to influence these behaviors, knowing that not every channel will resonate with every user or every company.

And that's where we get CSMs involved. And yeah, it's a new model for us, but I think it's helping us scale because we completely rethought our journey mapping and completely pivoted over to behavior mapping instead. Yeah,

Andrew Michael: [00:18:46] I like it as well as the shift in focus from, like you mentioned all of the activities that are important to you versus actually what's important to the customer and being able to map that out, the thing is all interesting.

You mentioned like the cross-functional team, like marketing and support and so forth, I think. And the [00:19:00] quantifiable aspect of it. Cause I think always sometimes like we can misread signals as well without understanding the behaviors behind them. So like a good example is support tickets can typically be seen as a negative aspect, but sometimes that can religious indicate that somebody is actually just trying to get on with things and get moving.

And this is why they're reaching out to support. So having this cross-functional team, I think it really allows you to see the signals. And I see you smiling as well. Whatever, what question or points of our trigger.

Brian LaFaille: [00:19:27] Okay. So it's actually interesting. One of the key behaviors that we would expect to see in the second month of a customer's behavior map with us is using support and we've done the research and the and we've had our analyst team work through.

What does retention look like for customers that actually engage our support team as a sign of engagement from that brand to Looker versus those that are just dark and quiet. And support is actually a stronger indicator for retention. So we want to drive them to our support channels. And we, this puts a lot of [00:20:00] work and onus on our support team to be flawless in their execution and be very helpful.

However, our support team is world-class again, go on G2 crowds, look at our C-SAT look at our support scores, people rave about their in-app chat support that they receive. And it's something that I think makes us unique. So we use it as a value proposition. If a customer is not using support, they're missing out on a key aspect of the license that they're paying for.

And so we actually want to push. People to using the support because we realize Looker is it is a enterprise BI tool. It can be complex, right? And so we want to offer them help, where it makes sense. And so that is actually something in participating with a cross-functional working group. The support team showed that insight and they said, look like we want people talking to us.

And it was actually super interesting because then we said, all right, awesome. We are going to now incorporate that in our digital channels, in our webinar kickoffs, we're going to mention the support channels in our email campaigns. Same thing. And all of these different motions, dry people to start engaging with our support [00:21:00] channel, taking advantage of the value they're receiving from support and, ideally unlocking additional value from the platform.

Andrew Michael: [00:21:06] That's awesome.  I love that as well. Cause I think it's like a lot of these things, sometimes you think counter-intuitively with him like, Oh, it's a bad experience for support. But actually like in this case, I get a bit of more of a technical product. It's really a good signal that if somebody is reaching out to support, they're actively trying to embed that service or work on the product.

So it's a good strong signal for engagement and a sign of a healthy customer actually. Next question then quickly. What's one thing that you've learned since acquisition about churn or retention that's you perhaps had a different perspective on before joining Google.

Brian LaFaille: [00:21:41] I'm going to give two the first is qualitative data matters. Google is a very, both internally and externally with their customers. They're a very feedback oriented culture. The perf cycle, the, or performance cycle that, that Google runs for all of its employees is world-class right. Other companies have done [00:22:00] case studies on it.

Similarly we actually run a C-SAT for our CSMs. We will send a survey. To our key champions, asking the customer about working with their CSM and all of that qualitative data is stored. It's analyzed and it's incorporated into how that CSM can improve. And we try to think about feedback as a gift. We try to think about this person is taking time out of their day to respond back to us and really, help us be better.

So let's listen to them. And so going into Google, I think that was one of the changes that, I w I was really appreciative of, because I think too frequently, especially you can think about Google, billions of users. They're just very quantitative and that's not the case. And we actually paid for additional research firms to come in and analyze net promoter score across all of the cloud products.

So qualitative data is critical to feedback and growth. And then the second thing I just mentioned is that, I think you have to test your your own biases. When we started with these behavior mapping exercises, [00:23:00] I we had some ideas, some hypotheses about what behaviors we thought were the best.

Attributes or characteristics of customers that go on to renew and expand. Many of those were proved, proven wrong. And, we had to test those assumptions and by having the cross-functional working team together, we said, look, these are all the behaviors we think make up a good customer in their first six months.

And then they go on to renew and expand. We handed that problem to our internal analytics team and said, now we need to go verify. Does connecting to database in the first month actually lead to higher retention. And we did that for every one of the behaviors and you have to do that. But I think it is a great place to start to say, look, if you have lots of different qualitative perspectives across seek customer success and product and marketing and support and professional services, and you get all these brilliant people together, you come up with a lot of different hypothesis that you can test.

But testing needs to happen. Because otherwise, like you said, you could be, trying to drive customers towards a behavior that may not, [00:24:00] actually impact revenue, retention that much down the line.

Andrew Michael: [00:24:03] Yeah, absolutely. I really like as well. The point on qualitative feedback and focus on speaking to customers specifically is all coming from like a company like Looker that builds a BI services for analytics and data.

And I think you it's, you can't really. Look at the watch without the Y or the Y without the what's I think. And that's where the qualitative and quantitative side comes in and it, to your point as well that you're making now, like you can come up with hypothesis, you can even get feedback from customers and that's a part of it.

And then you can go back to validate data or vice versa, see something in the data. Speak to customers validate why is it happening? You see something's happening. But having those answers will allow you to build like a much bit of behavior map, allow you to build better products and services and ultimately deliver more value to the customers.

Super interesting. I asked this question last time, but I have to ask it because I ask every guest every time Hypothetical scenario, joining a new company general, attention's not doing great 90 days to make an impact and fix things. What would you do with your time in the first 90 days? [00:25:00] If anything has changed since the last time we spoke.

Brian LaFaille: [00:25:02] Yeah. So I think my answer is going to stay the same. I think I'm going to lean back on, the message that I gave about risk management, understanding the reasons why customers leave and analyzing the data behind it. I also, the one thing I might change though, is, the timeframe and, the previously, when I gave my response, I was saying, you should analyze all the data available to you understand and categorize your reasons for risk, try to address those that's the lengthy process.

And that might be something that takes course over the, maybe three or four quarters, but in 90 days, if you truly want to have an impact on churn, I would categorize what are the customers that are high risk, mid risk and no risk. And if you're mid or high risk, I would have, executives on a plane or in a zoom meeting with those customers almost immediately.

And you'd be very surprised. The show of force that you bring to a customer with an executive and align executive relationships. That can have a big impact on churn and retention. So if I were to say [00:26:00] now, of course, that's not a long-term fix, you still need to fix those systemic issues over time.

And I think that's where my first answer speaks to, but, if we had 90 days, I would say, I remember Jay Nathan, over at higher logic he, and in Jeff. Challenged themselves to see a hunt. I think it was speak to a hundred customers in a hundred days. Yeah. And that's the sort of thing that can have a broad impact because you'd be surprised bringing in an executive into a meeting, showing your commitment to the partnership with an executive there and building the bridges there that can save an immediate turn.

It really can.

Andrew Michael: [00:26:32] Yep. At the end of the day, we're just people behind the software and building those connections empathizing, like that's going to win you back the customers. And I think having that close touch, showing that importance that you're giving to the customer will give you, give them.

You the benefit of the data as well, and maybe give you that chance to fix things and make things work. Yeah, very cool. Actually I was going to end. Yeah, but I had one last question for you. Maybe you want to let us know a little bit about customer success, field guide as well. So that as well, pop up on LinkedIn [00:27:00] recently what is it like?

Why should people be aware of it as well?

Brian LaFaille: [00:27:04] Yeah. So customer success, field guides is a side project. I had started under the the nudging from my, my, my manager coach. And for the longest time, I've been doing advising in customer success for a number of different channels with red point first round capital.

Now Google ventures and capital G. Okay. And, I think that the perspective that I had in customer success I've run support departments, I've run account management departments most recently built and founded customer success at Looker, from an employee of one up to, 50 plus people, $250 million in ARR, so that journey is unique.

And I'm the first person to admit that is something that does not happen too frequently in a career, to see that sort of exit to Google. And so I really want it to be able to share my experiences and my knowledge, whatever I could, that might be helpful to other CS leaders and CSMs themselves.

That might be helpful. And like my management coach said, you should just start writing about this because I was getting lots of [00:28:00] similar questions from all of the companies that I was advising. And so I decided to start writing about it and I'm sharing, all of my customer success, war stories, the things I did or didn't do, and the lessons and the learnings.

And most recently we've started to do an interview series that are super short, digestible interviews with CS leaders. In the industry and in a super digestible format, no more than, five to eight minutes to read the whole interview. And so yeah, looking to build that out and share my knowledge and hopefully it's helpful to other people in the CS community out there.

Andrew Michael: [00:28:31] Awesome. Yeah, we'll definitely have that in the show notes. If you want to check that out and will be available and turned out FM and you can check the data, what is the URL as well that they can access it?  

Brian LaFaille: [00:28:39] Customer success field guide.com.

Andrew Michael: [00:28:41] There we go. Cool. It's been a pleasure having you today.

Thanks very much, Brian, for joining. Like I wish you best of luck now going forward in 2021. And obviously I know you're working on plans for a new house and renovating, so I hope that all goes well for you. And you move in pretty soon.

Brian LaFaille: [00:28:56] I appreciate it, Andrew. Thanks again.

Cheers. Thanks. [00:29:00]

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Brian LaFaille
Brian LaFaille
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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