AI for CX and CS, and Customer-Led Growth
We’re joined by Gianna Scorsone, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Champion, to share her insights on customer-led growth as a strategic revenue driver. She explores how customer marketing can closely align with customer success to improve metrics like win rates, time to close, and retention.
That's when I want to speak to a live person.
That's when I want that live person to be available.
We got to give people the ability to understand customers
so they can focus on the more complex, important things.
I'm kind of not going to answer that.
I think it's highly situational of like, where it makes sense.
The leader that it makes sense, like, who truly believes
and who's closest to the customer, all of that jazz.
Real talk backed up with real action.
This is GTM News Desk.
I'm Nick Bennett.
And I'm Mark Killins.
Let's see what's trending.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is a good one.
I'm Nick Bennett.
I am here with the incredible Mark Killins.
Mark, how are you doing today?
I'm doing well.
You have a different level of energy today, Nick.
And it's-- yeah, honestly, I'm drinking a coffee
and I put too much sugar in it.
And it's getting me a little edgy.
Sure.
[LAUGHTER]
Be careful.
Be careful with that sugar and that caffeine.
If you don't, you know, that's a dangerous combo.
Absolutely.
Well, today we have an amazing episode.
We have a fantastic guest, Gianna, who's one of the co-founders
over a champion.
We'll be joining us a little bit later in the episode.
But we have some interesting headlines today.
And I'm going to kick things off with headline number one here.
But for anyone that doesn't know Zendesk out there,
they're a massive-- I feel like they're one of those, like,
you know, 500 pound gorillas.
I feel like so many companies use them.
But they just recently unveiled AI powered solution
that's going to help elevate the CX side of things.
And so when I was reading this, you know,
I feel like I contact so much, like, customer support.
And this is a weird side tangent.
But I'm curious on your thoughts on this.
Like, if I have a software that I purchased or something
and there is no live chat support,
it gets me so angry because I hate calling people.
I hate talking on the phone.
And I would much rather just, like, live chat with someone.
It helps spot has an incredible live chat support.
But, like, I'm just curious, like,
what do you think on live chat?
Like, are you pro or con?
Absolutely need to do it.
I love it.
And the reason we're talking about this story--
and I got one slightly related to customer
or customer success is because we're
going to talk a lot about customer-led growth,
this new channel with Gianna--
I definitely agree with you, Nick.
I think you need to invest in live chat plus a chat bot.
And for most companies, when you get to this point
and scale and size, you need email
and you even need phone for probably the most important
customers or customers that buy that type of service level.
But, yes.
So Zendesk, it sounds like they have created no surprise,
Nick, an AI, something.
But, yeah, tell us more about why you think this
is a newsworthy story.
So it is just, again, I feel like everyone's creating
an AI something.
But the way that I thought about it--
and one of the most, I guess, there's really
two big things that came to me, actually, three,
when I think about it from a pro perspective.
So the efficiency gains.
So they're using AI to handle routine, repetitive tasks.
And if you think about it, I'm sure
as a purchaser yourself and others,
there's things that us and a million other people
have questions for.
And it's just-- I think of just a chat bot.
It's like you ask something.
It's able to use AI.
It's able to get you that answer.
I don't need to speak to a live person.
But what it does is it frees up those humans
to focus on more of the complex, the meaningful interactions
with customers.
And those are the conversations that are ultimately
going to hopefully drive more retention.
Because at the end of the day, we all
probably have complex things that pop up in time to time.
And AI might not be able to solve that.
But that's when I want to speak to a live person.
That's when I want that live person to be available.
That's when I want this to be scalable.
Because their AI feature works across multiple channels.
It works across chat.
Works across email.
It even works across voice.
So as Zendes-- obviously, they're a huge company.
Lots of big, big, big companies use them.
And so when you have larger volumes of customer requests,
it makes it so you don't have to worry
about losing the quality.
And any customer that's out there,
any business that's out there--
and I think this could even be B2C, B2B, whatever--
if you have high volumes of customer inquiries,
but you want to strike the balance between automation
and personal touch.
Because again, you should never get rid
of the personal touch, people first.
But there is times where you need the automation.
And I think what their new product does
is it blends that balance incredibly well.
But you don't want to be over resilient on AI, which I think
goes back to like, yo, hey, if you're
getting rid of that less personalized touch point,
it turns people off.
They might churn, and it's just like, oh, at the end of the day,
I'm not even talking to a real company.
I'm talking to AI.
So I think from what I've read,
they seem to be able to blend that nice component together.
And I'm interested to see how that continues.
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day,
you need to solve people's problems.
People bought something to help them solve a problem.
As they use that thing, whatever it is,
problems probably will come up.
Questions will come up.
And you need to delight them as fast as you can
by answering that problem as quickly as you can.
Addressing it, answering it, and making sure it doesn't happen again.
So using a combination of everything you just said
is for most companies, once you get
to this critical number of customers,
could be 50, could be 100, could be more of that,
like you need to have a multifaceted customer support
and customer success motion, which gets into the second headline story.
Another AI-ish-centric story, but my good friend,
Elias, from my days at Drift and HubSpot,
has just announced his new company called Agency.
And guess what?
He's focused on empowering and helping customers success folks,
customer success managers, the customer success function.
Be better at serving their customers,
because there is a shit ton, Nick, as you know,
demand on customer success people.
Like, they got to be a part salesperson,
part support person, part like change management agent,
part product expert.
It's probably, 'cause I was a CSM for two years.
And when I was at HubSpot, and it is a very demanding job.
So to have a company and having someone who comes
from a marketing background, a sales background like Elias,
help and think about CSMs in a new way,
using something called agentic systems.
I'm sure we're gonna talk more and more about agentic AI,
agentic systems, in the future GTM shows that we do.
The fact is, though, like, we need to give people
time back and need to give them a superpower
so that to the comment I made right before
the second headline was introduced,
we gotta give people the ability to,
and you said it well, to understand customers
so they can focus on the more complex important things
and do surprise and delight moments
versus the rote routine tasks.
A lot of the tech I've been seeing is about marketing,
sales, revops, but like, we're missing
this customer success piece.
So I'm very excited for this company agency.
I think it's going to eventually, my gut tells me
it's eventually going to inform a lot of marketing
and sales things, because the one thing
that also most go-to-market teams have in a lot
is all of the insights coming from the customer
side of the house, and using that as it relates
to the marketing and sales, presale side of the house.
I still think there's a big divide on the data
and the insights being shared there.
And I feel like AI and agents and co-pilots will be
the bridge that gets us much closer to
getting those two core functions united.
- Mm, I love that.
Yeah, I'm 100% in agreement.
Honestly, we should get him on the show at some point
because I would love to dig more
and learn more about this myself.
- I agree, we will definitely get Elias on the show.
I will send him this snippet and recording me at Elias.
You have to come on the show.
I saw him just the other day at an event,
and he's all fired up.
I've never seen him this fired up in a long time.
And what he's really focused on is
giving people more agency.
Giving, and so agency is a very interesting word.
It means a lot of different things like most awards do,
but he wants to enable and empower people
to focus more on the most important things
that are truly solving for the customer.
I love it, which again, if you take that approach
and you take the approach of what Zendesk is doing,
it's gonna fuel a customer-led growth strategy,
a true growth channel that should be used across
your entire business, across the entire customer journey.
And that is what we're gonna be talking to Gianna
about right now at segment number three.
Buckle up everyone.
(upbeat music)
- Segment three, Nick.
We got a special one for you folks today.
This is gonna be a fiery conversation.
- That's a lot of pressure.
- A lot.
- No, it's not.
No, it's not.
We were preparing for this conversation
with Gianna right before this.
Again, Gianna, great to have you on the show.
Let's have you just do a quick intro.
Of course, you were a champion, one of the co-founders,
but just let the audience know a bit more about yourself.
You just told us you have a mouth of a truck driver.
(laughing)
- Give it away my secrets already.
Thanks a lot, Mark.
Thanks a lot.
I do, but only when I talk about work,
which is the weird part, like in my personal life,
I don't curse very much.
Don't know what it is about this fucking industry
that makes me curse, but it sure does.
Been in it for about 25 years,
went from services to product side.
Lots of learns along the way,
but my background, the lens in which I view things
is really through that go-to-market flywheel.
I started out in sales ops and really sales
and then to sales ops, worked my way up to COO.
My specialty is scaling, five to 100.
This is my first time doing zero to one.
So floundering a little bit, lots of success
along the way as well, but really learning that motion,
which has been a lot of fun.
So everything from SDR, BDR through customer success
is within my umbrella.
And so I've been having a lot of fun in my career,
really just using common sense and building from there.
- So as you folks heard, this conversation is all about
a somewhat new concept, a new growth strategy
called customer led growth.
And Gianna is actually at an event today,
as we record this episode,
related to this, if you will.
Customer marketing, customer advocacy,
you probably know those terms, but customer led growth,
somewhat new.
So how do you define this and what's the vibe
on the ground floor at this event, Gianna?
- The vibe on the ground floor is how do we get
bigger seat at the table?
How do we show the value of what this drives
and what this brings to the business?
And I'm sure we'll get into that in a little bit.
To answer your question on customer led growth,
my definition is that it's a channel.
It's a revenue generating channel, just like inbound,
outbound partnerships.
There needs to be a customer channel
and who's in charge of that should most likely
be customer marketing to bring it all together,
who they're impacting, right?
Our sales BDR, so thinking about new ARR,
helping to influence deals already in the pipeline
in addition to customer success
and aligning on their targets around NIRR.
So expansion, retention measures, upsells,
renewals, all that good stuff.
- So you feel this is something that needs to be talked about
at the executive sea level.
This is something that needs a real investment thesis
that's tracked, that then gets used across
the go-to-market teams, if you will.
- Absolutely, but what's crazy is that this is not new,
right?
You think about old-school sales methodologies
before technology was really driving BDRs
to make God knows how many folk calls
and AI is taking over and all of this.
Like thinking about the old-school sales mentality, right?
And services is still like this,
and this is what I learned in my services days,
12 years within tech services.
You hunt, you kill, you nurture, right?
You're finding your own deals,
you're building those relationships
and you're maintaining that relationship
and you're asking a really simple question,
who else would benefit from my services?
Would you mind giving me an introduction?
Customer-related sales has been around there.
Yeah, Nick, tell me.
- Well, yeah, Nick comes from the space.
He knows some of this.
He was a customer marketer, field marketer.
Yeah, what's your point of view, Nick?
- I agree 100%, and it's interesting,
and I feel like, I don't know,
maybe it depends on the industry.
Like I was always in Martec or sales tech,
and when I was in Martec,
it was a lot easier being a customer marketer
that's supporting, you know, obviously, you know,
retention, but also supporting AR growth,
because it's like, I use the product.
So I could talk from it, from both sides of it.
I could also explain to customers,
hey, this is how I'm using the product every single day.
This is how we actually decrease, like,
time to value with the customers that we have,
because I was just sharing my playbook,
like my stuff that I worked on every single day,
and it was like,
CS could give you that information,
but when you hear from another marketer,
it makes it a lot more real.
And then I could also hop on a prospect call
and help the sales team accelerate deals
through different types of campaigns and activations,
again, because of the way that I used it.
And I'm curious on your thoughts,
I'm like, who do you think customer marketing
should roll up to?
And the reason that I ask that is because
when I was at a previous company, Alice,
customer marketing, who was me,
who rolled up to our VP of CS.
And it was the first time that I've actually seen
that breakout where customer marketing,
I don't wanna say they were on an island,
but kind of were.
In your experience,
have you seen better success having a customer marketer
just be part of the marketing team roll up to whoever,
or have it more be integrated into the CS team?
- Oh, that's such a great question.
And my overall philosophy in business is like,
there's never a one size fits all,
and I hate absolute statements.
So like, Nick, I'm kind of not gonna answer that.
I think it's highly situational of like,
where it makes sense, like the leader that it makes sense,
like who truly believes that,
who's closest to the customer, all of that jazz.
Now, I am seeing a trend in that
many companies are moving more towards the CCO
and having this fit under the CCO.
Regardless, there needs to be really tight alignment
and having a shared goal on the impact
that should be driven from the customer marketing team.
I would say that I've seen like HubSpot, for example,
their community now rolls into the customer success org.
I'm starting to see that happen.
And so potentially within customer marketing,
there's like advocacy, there's community.
So there are different facets that might roll
into different teams and departments.
And I think that that's where it can get
a little bit confusing also.
So I would say, I've also seen it roll under product marketing,
which I think is really interesting.
I'd love to see it really roll into the CRO
and have super, super tight alignment with the CCO.
It's a growth strategy.
CRO should own this.
- Yes, yeah.
I agree 100%.
I think some of those earlier stage companies,
they might not have a CRO in place yet.
But I mean, I'm 100% on board.
And it's interesting, I used to also work for company Clary,
where we did have a CRO and everything kind of from a revenue,
even just retention AR, all that rolled under the CRO.
And I feel like it was such a better process
for everything from start to finish.
The customers had a better experience.
The prospects had a better experience.
And like we built a community.
Granted, I wasn't in customer marketing there.
I did build the customer community while I was there and launch it.
And it was one of the most successful things that they had
that ultimately turned into a prospect community as well.
But 100% on board.
- So basically Nick, you're just fabulous, right?
And the programs you put in place.
(all laughing)
- He's patting himself in the back, unfortunately.
- Totally, great job.
- Nick, great job.
- I'm gonna disagree.
As a marketing leader, former marketing leader,
I do not want to report to the CRO.
Nothing against people who are CROs,
unless the CRO comes from a marketing background,
I am not reporting to you, hard stop.
So I would report to you though, the CCO.
I think the Chief Customer Officer
should be someone who has a CRO, the CMO,
report into them.
It could be the Chief Operating Officer.
But again, I think the Chief Operating Officer
will come from a different background
than the Chief Customer Officer.
And this gets into the next question,
which is like, what are some of the mistakes?
Or the biggest mistake you see marketers making
when it comes to partnering with customers to drive growth?
Because depending on your experience
and the stories you've seen unfold in your career,
I think that's gonna obviously bias you,
put you into potentially a path that could be a big mistake.
Like CRO with marketing reporting to it,
in my opinion, is a big mistake.
- Ha!
I need to, okay.
And again, that's where absolute statements are really hard.
And so you've gotta find the right one for the right word again.
- I give a caveat, you ought to see the CRO
as a marketing background.
- Okay, perfect.
- I give a hard word.
- I see it, I see it, right?
Like that also makes sense, it's a tough one.
But number one mistake, I think it's really about
not aligning to the business outcomes, right?
And I think this is what's so critical
is that I'm still seeing that many programs
are running as a point solution
as opposed to one cohesive approach.
Again, if you're viewing it as customer-led growth
is a channel and it's not about a reference program,
a referral program, all of the different components
that go in case studies, et cetera,
and instead of how are we gonna use that customer voice
at the right point, that's what will make
a really, really great program.
And so thinking about how you align to the business outcomes,
right?
So think about a reference program, for example.
We have a client who just put this in place
and they're doing a fantastic job kind of programmatically
thinking about how they're gonna roll this out.
But they're aligning to the business outcomes of
we wanna help increase win rates
and we wanna help decrease time to close, right?
Those are two very strong metrics that you could look at
when putting a reference program in place.
And what I've seen is a lot of companies
might put two strict parameters.
We're only gonna give references for deals at this stage.
We're only going to allow X, Y, and Z.
When you do that, you're not thinking about
what you're actually trying to drive
and all of those situational moments
that happen in sales that might actually help tick the needle.
And so instead you wanna think about
how can we proactively give references
because the deals that are gonna close
are gonna close regardless.
So how can we help close those deals
that are really challenging,
that traditionally are not getting references
because you don't wanna ruin
or you don't wanna take up that spot
from that cherished customer.
So it's really thinking about increasing
the pool of referenceable customers
and then using it in those tougher situations
and that's where you're really gonna get
to those business outcomes.
- Kind of fits into the next question, right, Nick?
I mean, it's like the ways in which you think about
customer blood growth driving both impact
and the pre-sale motion versus a post-sale motion.
- I love this, right?
Because that's what customer marketing should be doing.
Like I think about customer marketing
as like the collective tissue, right?
Between sales and between customer success, right?
And so the impact that they need to have
is not only generating ARR growth
but also the retention and expansion measure.
And so how they do that is really thinking about
what are some of the indicators that are learned
through these relationships,
these specialized relationships that you're building.
How do you then aggregate that user level data up
to understand the impact that it's having on each of,
you know, the logos that you have in your portfolio?
Like I feel so badly for customer success
because they have these, you know,
books of business, the portfolios that are like 300 customers.
It's impossible for them to have
the right meaningful relationships and truly understand.
And this is the layer in which customer marketing
can come in, build those relationships
and really assist customer success to say,
here are your champions.
And if you're tracking job changes, a lot of,
and this is like where that new biz comes into play
to your question of like,
many companies are using job changes
to think about how do we build pipeline?
But how are you actually thinking about it
in the sense of, does this put your current logo at risk
that they just moved away from?
Is that your key stakeholder
that you're now going to have to re-break into that account
for that renewal?
What does this mean?
And so there are so many motions
that are going to help assist both
from the influence factor of references,
being able to assist in closing, right?
That's the new ARR, increasing the win rate.
There's referrals, right?
And so the referral factor is going to increase your pipeline.
And then as mentioned, there are all of these factors
that will help you understand renewal and expansion possibilities
and who's truly out risk by, again,
simply tracking job changes, right?
That's one example.
- I think you bring up a good point there
and you use the word influence.
And as someone that was a field marketer
before I was a customer market and I did ABM as well,
field marketer is like the way that we measured a lot
of the stuff that we did was through influence.
Like we weren't sourcing the pipeline,
but we were influencing a lot of things
through the campaigns and activations that we did.
And I think a customer marketer is in a similar boat
where, I mean, they're obviously not sourcing
the retention opportunities of these,
but they are influencing them through the activities
that they do and you need someone that understands
how as a marketer, you can leverage yourself
to influence deals that are in pipeline for renewal.
And even I guess, as new business as well.
If you ask a lot of marketers that question,
they don't, would you rather source
or would you rather influence in the campaigns that you do?
You'll get an interesting reply from a lot of them.
And I'm just curious on your thoughts on that piece.
- Yeah, I think what's easy about source
is that there's revenue impact associated with it
from a very direct sense.
Like I source this, this closed, I drove this revenue, right?
That speaks to a CFO, that speaks to sea level.
What's difficult about influence, right?
Is that everyone's trying to do an attribution model.
I hate attribution.
I hate it, I hate it.
Like who cares, right?
Like who cares?
All that matters is, right?
We're swarming this and we're closing it
or we're upselling it or we're retaining it.
And we know that these are all of the things
that contributed to that.
And then you could do some modeling from there
to truly understand that impact,
but that's what influence is.
We know that these measures have helped come to X outcome, right?
And so I think it's equally important
and that's really where I love that champion is going,
is that we're showing that influence
so that you can have a revenue trigger there similar to source
so that you can really start to show that revenue stamp
that you're putting on the business in a far easier way
than let's say like 5% attribution,
a lot of these arbitrary percentages
that have just really kind of been made up.
Yeah, 100%.
Well, we've got one more question
before we move over to the exclusive piece,
but if you had to think about a people first version
of customer-led growth, like what does that look like to you?
Yeah, I think super simple.
It's aligning with the customer journey, right?
You have to know the right ask, the right time
to the right person in the right moment.
So when you think about where they are,
if you've just onboarded, great time to ask for a testimonial,
you're not going to clearly ask for a key study.
Thinking about when the right time to ask for an introduction
to someone within their network,
also potentially great onboarding.
So is really thinking about where they are
in their own customer journey for your organization.
And aligning your different programs
to the key milestones that they're reaching.
We need to talk a lot more about the education piece,
the education that has to happen at the CFO level,
the C level in this exclusive concert that's about to come
if you subscribe to the Tech Network,
because as I was listening to the last five minutes,
I feel like that is the issue.
The people don't know across the marketing team,
the sales team, but at the C level,
how customer-led growth works,
how should it be implemented
across these go-to-market teams?
And I know you have a lot of tactical tips
on how to do that, Gianna.
So everyone, subscribe to the network if you haven't,
get the exclusive content,
and we'll talk to Gianna in just another minute.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM News Desk,
presented by the Tech Network.
To hear our full conversation with our guests today,
head to the link in the show notes to subscribe to the Tech Network.
Until next time, I'm Mark Killens, and I'm Nick Bennett.
Keep the people first, everybody.