GTM Innovators: Empathy at Scale – Mike Lemire on Customer Success in a Digital World

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In this episode of GTM Innovators, Kyle James sits down with Mike Lemire of Harmonic Leadership—musician turned customer success executive—for a wide-ranging conversation on the evolving role of CS in go-to-market strategy. From his early days at Blue Note Records and Yahoo to leadership roles at HubSpot, Toast, and Overjet, Mike shares his unique journey and what it taught him about empathy, value delivery, and scalable success. Tune in as we explore how AI, automation, and persona-driven engagement are shaping modern CS teams—and why human connection still reigns supreme in a digital-first world.

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Transcript:

Kyle James 00:00
Kyle, welcome to another episode of GTM innovators by 3Sixty insights. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re diving into really, I mean all things customer success and the modern go to market motion. So joining me today is Michael Lemire, Mike, welcome to the show. Kyle. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Mike, you and I both were at HubSpot, and just miss each other. But you know, it sounds like you’ve had a fantastic career, kind of in the digital marketing space. Started out in the music industry, spent time at Yahoo, at HubSpot, VP of Customer Success at a number of companies, including toast and overjet and just, you know, I think I’m a comic book guy. I always love to hear origin stories, if you will. But I’d love to, like, you know, share a little bit of your origin story about how you kind of became, kind of the customer, the Chief Customer Officer at stock that you are now, and kind of how you saw the evolution of go to market kind of play out over your over your career, and kind of, I don’t know, tie all that together, and then we’ll kind of see where the conversation takes us. Yeah, absolutely. So

Mike Lemire 01:13
no pressure, no no pressure at all. So my my really to my core, before I even get into the customer success stuff. I’m a musician. Right before we even started recording, we were talking a little bit about music and mics and everything, but so I went to Berklee College of Music, and a classical singer is my style. And so all of this, I try to bring a sense of musicality and just sort of harmony to the work music is content too, right? And so when I got out of school, I started working at record labels, and I knew HTML, which made me the Digital Marketer. They just, they needed someone to essentially put the new, newly developed iTunes buttons onto the artist pages, and because I knew HTML, that became my job, it was a tough time for the music industry, because Napster was quote, unquote ruining the industry at the time, and people really hadn’t figured out how to monetize digital music. Yeah, in the industry, it was also kind of, if you look back at the 90s for the music industry, there was a period where, with CDs, they were people rebuying the catalog that they already had. So there was new music sales and a ton of catalog sales that sort of boosted the industry. So when Napster hit everything just fell off the cliff. One sort of funny story from that era was I remember being in a marketing meeting. I was at Blue Note records for a new album we were working on for Anita Baker, and we were talking about putting a new technology on the CD that would allow you not to rip the CD into your computer. I was low man on the totem pole. Very new guy, first first job out of school, and so I didn’t speak up in the meeting, but I remember saying to my boss. I was like, I think of all the people that are going to buy this new Anita Baker album, I might be the only one who plans to rip it into their computer. I don’t know that the audience as much into digital music for old Anita. At that point, you’re already thinking of personas. At that point, already thinking of personas. Exactly. From there, I went on to work for some of the digital ad agencies that we partnered with. So I got to I was a media buyer and a media planner, so it was essentially my job to take the advertising budget and decide where it went and when I was doing that. There was a ton of optimization that would go into that day to day. How is it performing I’ll age myself. How is it performing on MySpace, how is it performing on Yahoo, and move the dollars around as I saw fit to maximize the ROI of the campaign. I also got to do, you know, here we are in podcast on a podcast together. This was 2007 2008 when I was doing that work. And I remember taking a really big swing and buying an ad on a podcast for one of my clients at the time, it was the very first podcast ad by the agency had ever done that the client had ever done. It was really early innings then, and it was all hard coded. There was no dynamic advertising, though, sure. So from from there, I wanted to so I was living in New York. I’m a Boston guy. Can’t wanted to come back to Boston start my family, and so I was buying a lot of advertising from Yahoo at the time. I had some good relationships there, so I was able to get myself a job running account managing, account management at Yahoo and overseeing some campaigns. So I had some two really interesting. Seeing campaigns I worked on there. One was for Living Social. I’d actually started a music distribution site in college with one of the founders of Living Social. He called me and said, Hey, will you run us sales for us? I said, I don’t feel like joining a startup now, but I’m happy to run your ads at Yahoo. And this was sort of Living Social. Was like a Groupon competitor, if you remember. And I saw the full rise and fall of that industry. I mean, it went from marketing campaigns of $10,000 a month all the way up to multi million dollars a month and then back down. And that was

Kyle James 05:41
big for a hot moment, all those kind of, you know, social buying. It

Mike Lemire 05:44
was massive. You look at, I think, you know, at the offer Groupon had on the table from Google to buy it, and they, they said, no, they thought they were going to take over the world. And I bet those guys are disappointed in that decision they made to not sell into Google at the height the other was, we worked on the Obama campaign. This is the second Obama campaign. And for most I don’t know how much ad buying experience you have, but for most ad campaigns, the way that you sell it is, you know, we project a million impressions on the Yahoo homepage on this day. If it goes under, we’ll charge you for what was actually delivered. If it goes over, we won’t charge you anything more than a million, but you won’t pay for anything else. So for forward or it’s all impression driven, yeah, sometimes you’ll go cost per click. Very rarely can you get a deal for like, cost per acquisition or something, but it’s usually cost per impression. So the the that works really well if you’re Ford or Pepsi to just roll the budget into the next you know, if you don’t go all the way, but for a political campaign, there is a finite end to all the money that they can spend. So the Obama campaign pressured us to adjust the way we were pricing overall, and they said, Well, if, not only if you under deliver, will we pay for what you the impressions you serve, but we’re going to pay for pennies on the dollar. So if you’re going to project and forecast an impression level for us, you better be really conservative and really accurate. So that was sort of a really interesting opportunity to adjust the way we were thinking about advertising. So a lot of interesting conversations with our legal team at Yahoo as we were working through that, which that led me to back in Boston, back in the marketing scene, and you were doing some great work over at HubSpot at the time, and then just, just be me there. And so essentially, yeah, and I appreciate it. So from there, I went over to HubSpot. And, you know, I think so much is made of the culture there. And I think one of the things that was present at that time was an honest focus on making sure that the people who were there had the best opportunity to learn and become some great business leaders in their own right. I’ll always remember on the first Friday of new hire training, Brian Halligan came in and did a little Ask Me Anything with my cohort of new hires, and one of the guys in the class asked him, What would success look like for you? So at that time, you know, HubSpot was already on its way to becoming a successful company. Brian had already sort of like, proved himself a successful CEO. And he said, You know, I really I’m inspired by the PayPal Mafia, and not only that, the people who left PayPal had enough financial strength to be able to start their own companies, but they had enough business acumen and savvy to make those companies successful. And that’s what I want to do with HubSpot. I want to make sure that the people who are here are set up well networked and are also smart enough to go off and build the next group of great tech companies. And they they did. He lived by his work, the transparency, the knowledge, the education I received there was unbelievable. When I was there, I had the chance to launch as a nights and weekends project that turned into a proper team professional services. As part, you know, we were, I was on the consulting team working with HubSpot customers, saw an opportunity. They really wanted more access to us and build out that program with a couple other partners internally, and then from there, after the IPO HubSpot was a lot of us had targets on our back, a lot of people wanted to come and work with us, and so I made the jump to another early stage startup in town called notarize that did online notarization software. So. Yeah, really cool. It had a B to B to C component to it a b to c component as well. Very different model than a traditional SaaS platform. We got to work really heavily with the mortgage industry as well. So I got to learn that vertical very different than a lot of the marketing work I had done in the past. And as a Customer Success leader, where I’d sort of grown up leading professional services, it was really my first opportunity to build a CSM team, a support team, an onboarding team, all from the ground up. So I spent about two years there building out that program before I moved over to toast. And when I was at toast, the main focus I had was building out a scalable customer success team, specifically in the SMB segment, which was really fun for me, because it was able to sort of blend a lot of the knowledge I’d gained on how to build a customer success team with a lot of the automation work that was so native to us at HubSpot. You know what the product did, triggers and outputs, was really what a scalable CSM model is all about. What is the data points we’re going to use to trigger some sort of campaign, and then how are we going to be able to measure the efficacy of that campaign based off of the performance of the CSM team or the digital assets? When I was at toast as well, I was able to start leading the customer education team as a way to start deflect, using more digital assets to deflect customer support tickets. I had a great, great experience there. Toast was a really interesting company. Is a really interesting company, because they’re a software company, but they’re also a FinTech company, because they run the credit card processing they’re also a hardware company, so going through hardware challenges, through the supply chain issues that came about during COVID was really interesting learning for me and you know, the customer base there of restaurant owners is pretty different than even the SMB customer base of a HubSpot

Kyle James 12:08
and the mortgage industry too. I mean, and, yeah, different verticals,

Mike Lemire 12:13
which? What do I do with that background? Of course, I get into AI for dentists for my next gig, a completely different user base there. So I was at over jet for about a year building out the customer success team there, onboarding and support, which now has sort of led me to run my own, my own firm. So today, I lead a company called harmonic leadership, fractional Chief Customer Officer for an early stage startup called stock that does AI for refrigerated retail products and harmonic leadership is the executive coaching firm and a customer success advising firm. Very

Kyle James 12:58
cool. So it’s interesting. You’re probably a very uniquely qualified person to answer this, and most people don’t get such different verticals, like, especially talking about building and leading Customer Success teams. There’s got to be some secret sauce or consistency that works across everybody, right? Like there must be for you to be for you to be able to go completely different still find like, massive levels of success. What do you think are like the core pillars of customer success that are, you know, not unique, but universal, right?

Mike Lemire 13:33
Yeah. I think number one is being customer centric, like actually caring about the people who are using your product, and having a willingness to go see them use your products, seeing the challenges they have, and sort of an interesting era that we’re in with, sort of AI, and I know we’ll get to AI in a moment, but sort of there’s, there’s almost this sense across all verticals of like, how can we, how can we figure this all out faster, without needing to talk to customers? Which kills me, because, you know, some of the best work and some of the most important aha moments I had as a leader was be sitting next to a customer, sitting across the table from a customer, and hearing their perspective and what their challenges are. It was, in fact, at HubSpot where I was talking to a product leader there, and they said, You know, I take a request from a customer seriously, but when I see a customer have already developed a workaround because there’s a feature that we don’t have, and they’re using that workaround to to make up for that lack of a feature. That’s a huge signal to me as a product leader, and you only get that by by going and spending time with customers that doesn’t come through a support ticket. So that’s a huge piece. I think the other is focus on value, and how do customers perceive value? How do they think about value? How quickly can they see value in the product? That’s something that’s been really in. Interesting to me, across the different types of products that I’ve worked with for a dental AI product, customers can see the value in the first 10 minutes of their onboarding call, versus a product like HubSpot, there’s a lot of building that you have to do. You need to set up the platform and upload contacts and start to generate contacts, and generate contacts, and the value starts to come over time, but not on the very first day that you have the product. So how quickly can you get customers seeing that first point of value, and then make sure they have a sustained sense of value? So

Kyle James 15:36
I want to double click on that, because it seems, it seems so obvious to everybody the first piece empathy, right? Like, you actually have to care. Like, why do you think that’s so hard? And why do you think so many companies mess that up? Because it it seems universally human that empathetic people do better. Like, why? Why do we fail at that?

Mike Lemire 16:00
Well, I think there’s, I mean, what’s there’s a couple things I see. So I see, sort of two primary types of CSMs enter into this world, people who care about customers through their hearts, and people who care about customers through their wallets. And honestly, I think a mix is good to have on a team. Sure, they’re both going to take that call at four o’clock on a Friday when they get the red alert email from their customer, but one of them is going to try and solve the problem because they deeply care about the software not working and the impact it’s going to have on the business on these people’s weekends. The other person is really worried about churn and how it’s going to impact their quarterly or annual bonus if that customer does churn and they don’t take that call over rotating on worrying about customers through your wallet or building a team accordingly, I think can cause some of that lack of empathy. I also have seen sort of two types of I think leadership sets the tone as well on how important the customer is, from the C suite down to the VP class. And I’ve got sort of a running theory on the way people enter executive leadership. The first path is through, coming up through the trenches, being an individual contributor, being on the phone with customers, working, building those relationships, and then over time, climbing the ranks into manager director, eventually getting into the VP class. The other is, I see people who come in from go to business school, get an MBA, join one of the big four consulting groups, and then sort of transition into executive leadership without having been boots on the ground. Both are important. It’s really important to have those MBA, those really savvy, deeply analytical people, but I find that the leaders who grew up working with customers and pairing with customers are more empathetic and continue to set that tone of empathy. So again, I think a healthy blend of both styles is what’s needed for most companies. So

Kyle James 18:16
this is probably a controversial question to even ask, but this is where we get to have the fun anyways. Why can’t those NBAs go and roll up their sleeves and do the trench work a little bit, you know, like that seems obvious. That’s the double win. Then they’ve got, you know, the experience and the degree, but there’s such a resistance to do that, right? And we give them cheat codes to not have to do that. Why don’t we make that a requirement, and then everybody can win. But you do see the people that are in the trenches that nights and weekends get their NBA and kind of work their way up. But, you know, sure, there are definitely people who’ve got both, but both worlds. But how do we get the other ones to do that too? Or, or is that unfair to even ask? I

Mike Lemire 18:57
mean, you see people who who do both, who’ve got that sort of skill set, they come out of McKinsey, and they are still willing to hop on a plane and work really deeply with their customers, and they are awesome to work with. I think it just comes down to people’s sort of natural abilities and natural skill sets, right? The executives that I’ve worked with who’ve come from that sort of MBA cohort and that sort of consulting style, they can run circles around people who came up through the tension trenches in terms of strategic development, strategic planning, forecasting abilities, communicating metrics across the organization. And so I don’t mean to say one is better than the other, but I it’s just sort of their natural skill set and where they feel most comfortable. It’s like, kind of like a DISC profile in that way, like, what is, what is their DISC profile? Right there the DC and I am, and I

Kyle James 19:53
Yeah, yeah. It’s very true. So going back to kind of some of the automation, because you’ve seen these facts. Growing companies and kind of work through it like and knowing the importance of showing value and building empathy and those relationships. Like, how do you balance that, right the tech touch versus the human touch? Right? Because you have this pressure to grow, grow, grow as fast as possible. But you know in your core that building these relationships and showing people that you care is what draws these long term customer commitments, like, is there secret sauces or a playbook? Like, how do you how do you play that out? It’s,

Mike Lemire 20:29
it’s, what’s been really interesting to me is how much, how similar customer success is to marketing in a lot of different ways. And so step one is understanding your personas. How do they want to communicate? How do they want to connect with you? How do they want to learn, and how do they want when and how do they want to get better? So you think about a restaurant owner versus a dentist. The restaurant owners are not at their computers all day. They’ve got their phone in their pocket. They’re they’re more of a text message sender versus an email sender. And they’ve got 1000 things to consider around running the business. And we need they need help. They need it just in time. They need the help right away. They also aren’t necessarily tech savvy. They don’t want to become a master of the software that they’ve purchased there. The fact that they’ve mastered toast isn’t going to go on their LinkedIn like a marketer might with without spot. They just want it done. They just want it done fast. So versus a dentist who’s running an organization, they have a lot of questions about how the software works, and they are much more likely to join webinars. Webinars are like core part of their culture. That’s how they get ongoing professional development credits as a dental professional, whereas restaurant owners are not webinar people that are so starting with the persona is really what makes a big difference, to know how they like to communicate, and when and where they like to communicate.

Kyle James 22:15
So that makes a ton of sense, right? And like, I’m very much familiar with kind of the concept of personas and how it works, and kind of the marketing and sales. Marketing and Sales world and even the product world. But you don’t hear a lot of people talk about personas for the customer success world, like, I’m curious, is that something you go in when you work with every company, like, what’s your personas? Let’s build these things out. Let’s start. Let’s help you build that understanding of them. Or, or do you kind of pull from the other orgs that have already done some of that work? I

Mike Lemire 22:40
try to pull from the other arts, right? So we’ve, we’ve what we typically do have in post sales, is the segmentation. So we’ll know, all right, we’re working. This is our SMB segment. There’s our mid market, so our enterprise, so we’ll have the segments defined. And then where I think I don’t see enough collaboration in customer success between CS leaders and marketers. Marketers know the personas of those segments really well. You just need to talk to them. They also know what’s working in terms of getting them interested to raise their hand and have a request to demo with someone. What are the pain points that are most resonant with that group. That’s the stuff that’s going to be really valuable. When you’re trying to engage a customer who’s shown a lack of usage with the product, to re engage them, it’s going to be very similar pain points, very similar communication skills. So I generally don’t go out and try and reinvent reinvent the wheel and rebuilding personas for post live, because it should exist within the marketing realm already. Yeah.

Kyle James 23:47
So kind of to that collaboration, like, how have you seen the role of customer success evolve? Like, in the GTM team right along, kind of the sales and like, to me, this is somebody who spent time in CS, who’s also going out and spend time in sales, but a lot of time in product. It was always obvious to me, because I had that experience and background, I need to be talking to CS people, because they know the pain of what I need to build, why and what the bugs are, and all of that stuff. Like, do you do you feel like? Like, how do you build? Break down those those silos, and really build those collaboration elements and moments to cross pollinate between, between, you know, departments,

Mike Lemire 24:26
yeah. I mean, I think sort of CSMs can generally, they kind of know everything they know. What are the problems in the sales funnel? What are the problems in the marketing funnel? What are the problems with the product? What are the problems on the billing side, like they kind of see it all because of it’s they’re the customers. They’re the people inside of the company that talk every day to the disappointed customers and help bring them back so they know what the pain points are. I mean, how it’s evolved and how it’s changed over time, in relation to the go to market team. I think you know, some of the things I’ve seen is it’s a constant question of, do we just have a CSM? Do we add an account management team who owns renewals, who owns upsells? Does the original AE continue to sell into them? Do we bring in a secondary team? If we have an account management team. What is the responsibility for the customer success manager at that point? If it’s not net revenue retention, which is typically the KPI? Another interesting question I’ve seen sort of go back and forth for companies over the last few years, is onboarding the concept of on, but that’s sort of the first touch point post sales typically, but for a lot of companies that handoff from sales to onboarding is really clumsy, and you can’t recognize revenue for most organizations until the customer is live. And so if there is a period of time, two weeks, one month, three months from close one to live on the platform, that’s a problem. We’ve got to reduce that so we’ve got to change the way we’re thinking about onboarding. So is onboarding a function of the fastest path to revenue recognition, or is onboarding a function of setting the customer up for the highest possible lifetime value by making them most successful in the product? And those two goals can be in conflict at times. Those are some of the changes. I think, also what’s been interesting, and when you think about the development of go to market over the past few years, versus what I’m seeing in customer success today is sales started. When you think about software that supported go to market teams or sales teams specifically, kind of the CRM was the end all be all product for them. And then over the last 10 years, more point solutions have been introduced to support a go to market team. I’m seeing a similar trend now take place with customer success, where for years, it was by Gainsight by turn zero, and that was essentially the CRM equivalent on the customer success side. And today, I’m starting to see more point solutions emerge for Customer Success teams to get more bespoke tools to solve certain challenges they’re facing.

Kyle James 27:22
Let’s, I want to double click on that because, because that, that’s really interesting point that you’re making, right? And, and I think it also ties into you talked about it too. Like, onboarding is probably a different skill set than a customer success manager, which is obviously a different skill set than a support rep, right? Yeah. Like, as you’re building your team, I mean, and I get every company is unique, and there’s no one, you know, solution fits all. But how do you think about those hires and how you build that org, whether from scratch or coming in and saying, we’re here? How do we continue to grow it? And maybe there are other roles that need to, you know, puzzle pieces that go in, like, how do you think about how all that stuff comes together and even ties into, like, the software and point solutions that you can bundle on to make those individual roles successful and communicate better with each other.

Mike Lemire 28:09
Yeah, so here’s, here’s the way that I see it typically emerge. So I’ve gone from you know, being on the founding team and Hey, Mike, you’re the only CS guy here, to running a team of multiple hundreds of people, so here’s the sort of stages that I see. So you got every company starts with engineer, product person and a sales guy, and that’s it. And so the salesperson is owns the go to market, owns the selling and then once the customers are closed, they end up continuing to talk to them at until they reaches a point where it’s like, I can’t keep talking to the customers. I need to go continue to hunt. So we need to bring in some post live team. That’s when you typically have your first CSM hire that CSM is then usually doing onboarding CSM and support. The first break off I tend to see, depending on the product, is support. Let’s separate the reactive from the ability to run some sort of proactive work for a CSM. So let’s separate all the tickets. So let’s start to build a support team. Once you’re starting to build a support team that introduces the zendesks of the world, or whatever ticketing system you’re going to use to manage support tickets. Once you add then onboarding breaks off and you start to specialize in that to give more customers the chance to flow through the sort of tube of an onboarder, right? Because they can graduate versus a basket of a CSM. They can only hold so many customers before they get full, and then you need to hire more CSM. So breaking that off allows you to be more effective with your CSM dollars. That’s sort of the three core pillars. You can see companies scale up pretty far, even just with those core disciplines. So. Uh, some other roles start to emerge there. It might be sales engineer or solutions, solutions and solutions, solutions engineer, depending on how technical of a product it is. So if there needs to be sort of heavy lifting from an integration standpoint, and the sales engineers need to stay on selling, and someone needs to carry the heavy lifting on the other side. And it’s too heavy for onboarding engineers. Kicking it back, we need to hire solutions engineers or a professional services team. The other team that can be introduced, sort of breaking out from those three core pillars would be account management, and I tend to see that if the opportunity for upselling or land and expand is too high and we’re not capturing the full opportunity we have to take advantage of because the CSMs are spending more time teaching the customers and focusing on long term value than running commercial opportunities when account managers, that’s kind of the the roles then and then. For every company, there might be a onesie twosie adjustment, and the software usually follows along with them. So bespoke onboarding software like there’s there’s one in town, a few hubspotters are at actually now that I like called on ramp, it sort of gives onboarding team a shared page to work with their customers, instead of a product like Asana, where you would then spend your first onboarding call explaining to your customer how Asana works, right? And then you can get into it. Management

Kyle James 31:40
System, you’ve got to learn to, like, learn how to use our system. Yeah.

Mike Lemire 31:44
So to talk about another piece of software that isn’t your own on your first onboarding call, not great. So those guys are solving that. You know, we talked about the Zendesk of the world for support, and then for customer success, products like Gainsight or churn zero. And then where more of the point solutions are coming is around products that can help you identify what a good health score can be, even before it goes into gain sites. So there’s a an early stage startup I like, called reef.ai today that’s doing some interesting analysis on customer health and converting that into a health score, and they’re able to really focus on that problem and that solution, as opposed to a larger product that’s trying to do all things for all different people in the CS department.

Kyle James 32:33
Alright, so talk to me about this health score, right? Like, is there common things that you see every company like goes into it, like usage or, you know, is it value returned, or is it completely all over the place? What different companies go into how they come up with that score? Because, yeah, the Holy Grail, right? Like, that’s the metric you care most about.

Mike Lemire 32:55
It does. It does and it, it’s one of those projects that’s kind of an evergreen, Evergreen project. You’re kind of always updating and adjusting. So we’re, you gotta Yeah, where the biggest, where everyone starts usually is, which is the worst, but you got to start somewhere. Is sentiment and just is this customer? Red, yellow, green. We have no data to go off of. But CSM, what do you think? How are they feeling. There’s a term in CS land called if a customer is a watermelon, and if you think of a watermelon, they’re green on the outside and red on the inside. And I’ve had plenty of customers who so happy. We’ve got a great relationship. You know, every their kids are graduating, you sent them a graduation gift for the kids, and then they churn on you because they weren’t seeing the value of the product. So even as much as they loved the relationship and they felt green, they weren’t because the value wasn’t there. So you’d quickly have to go away from sentiment. One of the things that I try and separate within a customer journey is the concept of activation versus onboard or adopted. So for activation, for me, it’s a binary concept. Has this customer proven a singular instance of their ability to autonomously use the product? So the example I’ll give here is online ordering for toast. I think even just does it, even if you’ve never used the online ordering software as a user of toast, you’ve probably bought something online from a restaurant, so you have an idea of what that feature is. When a restaurant sets that up, typically, they’ll test it one time, and then they might call their business partner and say, Hey, go. We’ve got the online ordering link. Let me send it to you. Buy a coke. Buy a can of Coke on online check test it out. And what we found was that five transactions through online ordering was the inflection point for them to continue to use. Use the product one or two wasn’t because it would be maybe a test example, and then they might not actually bring live the site or post the site anywhere for their users to get to. So once we saw five transactions, we knew that they that customer is activated on that product, and that’s different than adoption. In my the way that I use the term adoption, to me was either a rolling 30 or rolling, 90 day ongoing measurement of usage in comparison to the other features within the product. So if it’s online ordering again, what percentage of their overall takeout orders were flowing through online ordering, if it’s a pizza shop doing 100 orders a day, and 50% of them were coming through online ordering. And then over time, we start to see more phone calls and less online ordering. That’s going to hurt the adoption score. So those are some, one of the breakouts that I try to create, because if the customer hasn’t activated on a product, you have a much shorter leash with them before you engage than you do if you start to see just focus on rolling 90 days of adoption, because I will show up much later. The other challenge I sometimes see for early stage startups when they’re trying to figure out this health score is they just don’t have enough churn data or consistent usage leading to churns to get confident in the numbers they set. So they’ve got to do their best to just plant the flag let the water run through the pipes on that customer health score, how accurately is it predicting their likelihood to go at risk, and then how likely are our at risk mitigation plays to be successful in saving those customers and then taking all that data and rerunning the health score every quarter, every half

Kyle James 36:56
makes sense. Makes sense. So you knew we were going to get to this point, right? Like, kind of the AI element is probably the biggest one. But, like, the innovations and shifts like that, you see, kind of coming into the space to, kind of what is coming into go to market and see as strategies, like, are there certain new, you know, point solutions? Or, how do you see AI playing this out. And, you know, how does it change the relationship building, and where are we going with some of this stuff? What’s,

Mike Lemire 37:27
what’s interesting about customer success, I think, is that oftentimes it’s viewed as a cost center, as opposed to, you know, versus a sales team, which is supposed to drive revenue. And so one of the things that I’m hearing from other CS leaders right now is, hey, I’m being asked to figure out my AI strategy. Okay, what a weird, like responsibility to put on a seat to do what like, what is your AI strategy? What problems are you trying to solve? CS leaders are just being asked by their CFOs or their CEOs to go figure out your AI strategy for your team, and what most of that is becoming. What problem can they quickly solve is cost reduction, and so where you’re seeing it show up most often is through chat bots. Customer facing chat bots reduces the need for customer support hires. It’s resolving tickets faster. Let’s unpack the term resolve there for some what do you actually mean? Resolved? Is that a satisfactory resolution for the customer and even some, some, even if it’s not a chat bot. How can we make the CSM more effective so we can put more accounts on their plate? When I’m at a CS leader event or like a dinner or sort of a meet up, I like to ask this question, and not I’ve not gotten a single answer that has been helpful. Of what is the AI product that you’ve brought into your company that’s had a net positive effect on your customers experience? I’m sure there’s a ton that you’ve brought in that have been really cost effective, but what is making your customers experience better? And that’s really what I’m interested in and what I’m trying to find right now. So the company I gave the example of reef.ai I think they’re someone who is focusing on, where are the points in the customer journey that are really important, that I should be flagging for a CSM to proactively engage with the customer. I think that has the possibility to help a customer experience. But I don’t hear enough CS leaders being able to clearly articulate the problem they’re trying to solve, other than cost reduction, when they’re looking for AI strategies,

Kyle James 39:52
yeah, yeah. Let me, let me double click and see if I can take a stab. Yeah? Please, like I’m just listening to you. Think of some other conversation. Exactly like and putting on my empathetic customer hat, right? Like, if I’m a customer, I don’t want to talk to another bot. I want to talk to people if I’ve got a problem, and I want to build relationships, because that’s what makes me feel good. So you know, if we’re thinking about these solutions and what they’re good at, like, maybe it is something that transcribes the calls and takes all my notes so I don’t have to do all the follow up work or the prep work that it’s giving me exactly what I need to go into this conversation with, so that I can spend more time on the call and less time doing all the pre and post work. And maybe that’s the right way to think about it, because relationships, I hope never go away and and you can’t get a hope we’re not going to, like, having the AI, you know, telling the customer that it cares, unless, unless, who knows it goes this place where it’s AI is talking to AIS, and we’re all out of the way. But, right? But like, if it’s doing those things to, like, make it so you and I can have a more in depth conversation. Maybe that’s the win. And how do we, how do we do some of that with some of the tools in place? What do you think about

Mike Lemire 41:06
that? I agree with you. Um, I’m just not hearing that same pitch in CS. So when you, when you hear that pitch to a sales leader, Hey, make your sales reps more effective so that you can sell more. And the result it’s not hire fewer sales reps, it’s make your sales reps more effective. The pitch to CS leaders is hire fewer CSMs because they can have more conversations and be more prepared for those conversations. So there continues to be this focus on, hey, stop hiring people to talk to your customers, and make the people that you have really, really good at talking to those people. And look, I’m not. I’ve run a budget before. I understand what it is to be efficient with your dollars, but there is a difference in the way that they’re pitching these software products to CS leaders, and it’s all about reducing the amount of people that these customers have access to,

Kyle James 42:10
which I just don’t love well. And you and I both know, like, the only way to get really good at having those conversations with customers is you have lots of calls with conversation with customers. Like it’s you put in the reps you get better at the more of those conversations you have. And you can’t do that when there are fewer people trying to do that, like they’re just overwhelmed and burnt out and and, yeah, it takes time and effort and energy.

Mike Lemire 42:34
Yeah, and I don’t think there’s a chat bot company that I’ve seen yet that can effectively handle escalation calls and de escalate a real person and come to an actual path forward with them, people that

Kyle James 42:47
would just that would trigger most people, the fact you’re,

Mike Lemire 42:53
yeah, I agree. Well,

Kyle James 42:54
I want to be mindful of your time, Mike, but I do have kind of a lightning round question that I wrote down here at the beginning that come circle fully around to, is you being kind of the the audio audit file? Is that the right word? The the guru of music. I’m a big fan of suno.ai I love writing my songs with my kids. Like, what do you think of that? What do you think of these kind of tools that just make it stupid simple, that anybody can write decent, you know, maybe even borderline good music with no skill. Like, how does that make you feel, like, knowing, like, your experience and background and friends in those industries? Or are you fully for it?

Mike Lemire 43:32
Yeah, I’m fully for it. I’m fully for it. I you know, I think I’ve got some friends who do, who are performers, and we’ll talk about the role of AI a lot, you know, you think of of where we are with video games and virtual reality, and people still go to plays. People are still going to see, sort of, the old form of entertainment. You think about the role of electronic music, and sort of even, you know, folk festivals losing their mind when artists would show up with an electric guitar, you’re ruining what music is. This isn’t music anymore. So I think this is a new instrument, a new tool. And humans have always found ways to use new tools and use new instruments to create more interesting forms of art, and if it makes people who wouldn’t have otherwise had access to a creative outlet have access to a form of creativity, I think it’ll push the ball forward. I don’t think though AI generated music, will move the heart and soul in the same way that people human generated music? Well, I think, yes, ultimately, Soul speaking to souls, yeah,

Kyle James 44:50
and I don’t, I would never claim to be a musician, but, but I’ll give you one recent story just to kind of share something a little imparting. Here is, I’ve got a friend of. Mine, who I coach him on on my seven year my son’s seven year baseball team, and his little brother, who I’ve known since he was born, turned four. So I just let me go right? I know that Ronan likes monster trucks, so let me go write a little AI song about monster trucks, wishing him happy birthday, and I will say the light in his eyes when he heard his name, saying happy birthday with this song, it sounded like, what is it? What’s the blaze and the monster? Oh, yeah, yeah. I know Blaze and whatever monster

Mike Lemire 45:31
machines or whatever monster

Kyle James 45:32
machines like it sound like that thing thong, but it had his name and his excitement and energy. Woke up when I played this thing for him, it could pull but, like, is it going to connect with deeper people? I think you’re right, but, but it’s to be able to produce something like that for him, was super cool in the moment, and just to see his reaction to it. Yeah,

Mike Lemire 45:53
I do think we need transparency of who the artist is. So I think that should be really, really important. So, you know, there’s some shenanigans with Spotify and sort of like, are they pushing AI generated music to reduce the royalties they have to pay to live artists like that can get into some slippery space, especially where so much of Spotify can just be, like, ambient work, music that people keep on in the background all day, like there are real artists who try and make that type of music So, but the use case of of dads building it for their kids. Love that. Yeah,

Kyle James 46:25
yeah. And I will even say, like this podcast here, the opening theme. Anybody wants to go back and listen to it, I wouldn’t add AI generate that because I can’t afford to go to some expensive stuff. And maybe at one day, we’ll get to the point where it will but

Mike Lemire 46:38
anyway, when you get to that day. Let me know. I’ll connect you with some great musicians. Please do with

Kyle James 46:44
that being kind of said Mike, so so glad to have you join us today. It is incredible insightful, kind of really digging in and getting your perspective on on kind of how CS works and how you think about it. But really let everybody know. How can they help you? How can they connect with you? What’s the best way to find you and kind of stay in touch, and what can they help you with?

Mike Lemire 47:03
Yeah, thank you. I think the best place to find me is harmonic leadership.com that’s where my firm is based. And,

Kyle James 47:11
you know, now we know why things, why it’s called harmonic now, because all, it’s all coming full circle now that we got the origin story exactly,

Mike Lemire 47:19
exactly. So if there’s, if anything that I said today resonates with you or your team, or you’re hoping to develop yourself sort of as a stronger leader, and would be, would like to work with me as an executive coach, you can find me there, and then, I think otherwise, if you have an AI product that you love, and you’re a post sales leader that’s having a positive impact on your customer experience, send it my way. Like everyone else, I’m trying to stay abreast of the industry and learn myself. So I would love to hear some success stories. I

Kyle James 47:50
would love to hear that too. So anybody that’s got that sent into both of us, and with that, everybody, if you enjoy this episode, please like subscribe five star reviews only. We don’t take four and a halfs, just five stars. And if you’ve got another topic or suggestion that you’d like to hear the next episode, please reach out research at 3sixtyinsights.com and with that, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in. And we’ll be back next week with another go to market innovators. And until then, keep growing. Everybody.

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