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With years of experience at managing customer success (CS), Jake Dipple knows how important it is to foster collaboration between businesses and their customers.
And at a company like Sideways 6 — whose product is an idea management software to help organizations engage people and foster innovation — that emphasis on collaboration gets even louder.
Jake, Head of Customer Success for Sideways 6, explains that the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, with CS being an integral part of impacting the entire business.
In this episode of Growth Stage, host and CMO of FastSpring David Vogelpohl interviews Jake about his thoughts on:
- What Customer Success is at a high level.
- How CS impacts your ARR, product value, and marketing.
- And much more!
Full Interview
Customer Success Insights From Jake Dipple
What Customer Success Really Is
Jake acknowledges that customer support is a very important part of the relationship a business has with its customers, but it’s often focused on responding to issues after they arise.
Customer success shifts collaboration from plotting where the customer needs to get to, to collaborating on the front side of utilization.
“Support is an important part of that,” he says. “But the support team are responsible for first response times, for things like NPS, whereas what we’re responsible for is, ultimately, outcomes.”
Jake says that since the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, they use three key value drivers: employee engagement, engagement in a transformation (within a period of change), and continuous improvement.
Listen to the episode to hear more details.
Why Customer Success Is a Great Investment
Customer success is more than just an arm of or partner to customer support — it can have a huge positive impact on ARR, product value, and marketing.
As customer success representatives interface so much with customers and begin to uncover their needs and how they use the product, they become the voice of the customer to other internal departments, gathering and reporting pain points, key gains customers need to achieve, and the key technological capabilities they need to adopt.
This all gets driven with three Vs: value identification, value realization, and value delivered.
Product teams can better improve and develop products when customer success has helped identify what customers need. The realization of value in the product by meeting customer’s goals will endear the product and the company to customers, increasing retention and therefore ARR. And as happy customers are vocal customers, an emerging trend Jake is seeing is customer success-driven SQLs, or pre-qualified leads handed to the sales team by the customer success team.
“We really do touch every organization in the business, which consists of product and engineering, services, sales, marketing, product, and people,” he explains. “So that’s [just] within Sideways 6; I’m sure there are [even] better examples in other companies.”
Listen to the episode to hear more details.
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Transcript:
Jake Dipple 0:00
One of the things that we’re trying to get better at is exposing Product Engineering to our customers. That helps build empathy for, for their pain, to help build their knowledge, helps get them better accustomed to hearing sort of what our customers are trying to do. And that can only be a good thing.
Producer 0:17
This is the Growth Stage podcast powered by FastSpring. And here’s your host, David Vogelpohl.
David Vogelpohl 0:24
All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we focus on SAS and digital product companies and how they grow revenue, build meaningful products and increase the value of their business. I’m David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, we’re going to talk really talk about building value in your business. And to do that we’re going to forget support, and instead we’re going to optimize for full funnel customer success. And joining us for that conversation. As someone who knows quite a bit about that, I’d like to welcome to Growth Stage from Sideways 6, Mr. Jake dibble. Jake, welcome to Growth Stage.
Jake Dipple 1:11
Thank you very much delighted to be looking forward to this. Excellent,
David Vogelpohl 1:14
well, so glad to have you here. And I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on what customer success is, at a high level is at a high level. I know that’s kind of a squishy term sometimes. But even more importantly, how a customer successful impact folks ARR also the product value marketing, and really much more that whole full funnel side. I’m also really looking forward to talking about some of your maybe more unconventional tips, I know it’s Sideways 6, you’ll have some things you do as some of your customers that might be good examples for others. But really around that, that idea of getting customers that love your brand and love your product. So really looking forward to the conversation. So Jake, I’m gonna kick it off by asking you the same question I asked every guest here on Growth Stage. What was the first thing you bought online?
Jake Dipple 2:06
There are two answers to this question depending on how I want to appear to the audience. But the the, I suppose the proper answer would be that this was probably back in 2010. And I remember going to university in Manchester, which is in the north of the UK, Hill, North of England. And for the first time ever, you’re independent, you have to buy stuff for yourself. And I got to the first day of my course. And I was given a list of books that I had to buy for study materials throughout that year. And I believe that a number of those books I purchase on Amazon that I think was the first thing that I bought, but as back in the days of no prime delivery. Amazon didn’t have a number of the things that it had today. So it feels quite a long time ago. The other answer was that I think it was I think it was a Domino’s Pizza. I’m fairly I’m fairly certain the first thing that I bought live was the Domino’s Pizza, but I think you
David Vogelpohl 3:12
should own the pizza and like that’s a pretty good first thing you bought online.
Jake Dipple 3:15
It was probably the last thing I bought online as well. I think that was
David Vogelpohl 3:19
maybe even the first purchase online was a pizza but maybe I’m wrong about that. I’ll have to research that that’d be an interest. It
Jake Dipple 3:25
was the first it was the first trading of Bitcoin. I believe. I believe someone offered someone a Bitcoin to go and buy the pizza.
David Vogelpohl 3:34
Oh, that’s yeah, the first Bitcoin offering I did see a contest once a sign it was like a, I don’t know, a raffle. And they were giving away. I forgot what it was it was like a PSP was first prize and then something else was second prize and 10 Bitcoin was third prize. And when that raffle
Jake Dipple 3:53
would have been quite good yet,
David Vogelpohl 3:54
yeah. Awesome. Well, that’s cool. Yeah, I know when you’re buying your books for university that can be very expensive. I could imagine going online, see if you could get a deal and make a lot of sets.
Jake Dipple 4:06
You bought, just out of interest.
David Vogelpohl 4:08
First thing I bought. I believe it was a cure for poison ivy. I had poison ivy really bad. And I just went on the internet and search for it. And I found something called Zan fell that ended up working really well for me. And I think that was the first thing I bought online. Nice. So cool. So anyways, what we’re here today to talk about, though, primarily is around customer success. And I was wondering if you could start though by telling me a little bit about what Sideways 6 does and what you do there?
Jake Dipple 4:40
Of course, so, Sideways 6 we’re ID management platform, and we exist to bring good ideas to life every day. From everywhere from everything from anyone. That’s a that is our mission. Think of us as like a idea management CRM tool. So CRM for ideas like HubSpot for ideas, you getting out and getting ideas and the top of the funnel, nurturing them, and ultimately sort of bringing them to life. Now we do that through two ways predominantly, that’s through collecting ideas from where people are. So a native approach to the tools that people are using today, typically, Microsoft Teams, we work with enterprise organizations. So it sits within Microsoft Teams that have to leave their experience to submit an idea. And that brings more ideas into the top of the funnel. But secondly, we have a very powerful back end platform that provides things like automations, communication, collaboration, to be able to nurture those ideas and bring them through to the eventual stage, which is when they get implemented, and impacting these organizations. And we support organizations like Marks and Spencers, which has enormous retail here, Balfour Beatty, which is a big construction company, which operate across the globe, Nestle, and others as well then in my role at Sideways 6 is Head of Customer Success, which essentially means that we provide our, our customers with IDEA expertise, to help them drive towards their desired outcomes, or their success metrics that they need to impact. And that’s primarily done through the ongoing optimization of what we call their ideas program, by providing them with opportunities to optimize their people, their process, and the application of their Sideways 6 technology in order to drive that success. You
David Vogelpohl 6:24
know, it’s interesting to hear you frame both the platform and your in your team’s role there. And so it sounds like fundamentally Sideways 6, as you pointed out, is an idea management platform that helps you kind of originate and collect the ideas and then I guess see them through to fruition. And you kind of framed customer success is like well, we’re we’re trying to help our customers achieve that outcome and find success and using the platform. You didn’t talk a lot at all about support is support in your sphere. Is that a separate word within Sideways 6?
Jake Dipple 7:02
It’s a separate word within Sideways 6. So support is is how we would typically define our reactionary. Teams are sort of, there’s a, I can’t do this. How to, for example, why can’t I see this, whereas success is very much on the proactive, outcome driven consultative side, where we are much more proactive with our customers needs, we plot where they need to get to. Support is an important part of that. But the support team are responsible for first response times for things like NPS, whereas what we’re responsible for is ultimately outcomes. And Sideways 6 renewal so IRR. So
David Vogelpohl 7:50
what would be like a typical outcome, I’m just trying to get for the conversation, get a good understanding of like for others, especially those watching or listening? It’s like, how are you identifying? What is that? What are the KPI that matter? For?
Jake Dipple 8:07
Great question. So the current trend is is is ultimately to measure our success through the customer success. So what are the key metrics that the customers are looking to impact or improve? What are the key outcomes that they’re looking to impact to improve, and we’ve got key three, three key value drivers that we typically sell against, and then deliver against post sales. And those are employee engagement. So big, very important thing in today’s world is through COVID, a loads of employees have felt disengaged, disempowered, and that has resulted in quite quitting, you know, huge amount of job losses, lack of productivity, etc. So some customers may be looking to improve their employee engagement scores. And as a result, increased productivity, increase staff retention, etc. That’s, that’s one value driver, which we support. The other one is sort of engagement in a transformation. So typically, customers have gone through a period of change, and then are looking to embed a transformation in their workforce. When I was at sprinkler, our old president, a guy called Carlos Dominguez, who has access go, used to come into a room and just do this thing where he goes, put your hands up here who likes change, and everyone would throw their hands up and go change is awesome changes great. You know, I love change, I should be seen as being adaptable to change. And he goes, that’s really interesting, because I like change when it’s my idea. And the premise being that if you can give employees a voice in that transformation in that change, they’re mostly they’re much more likely to be engaged in it. And then that transformation is much more likely to be successful. But that’s that’s the second one and then the final One is really what we call business improvement or continuous improvement. So what are the small quick wins that can happen across our organization? What are the new products and services that we want to come maybe deliver? What is this cost cutting initiative, which we need to implement, and those things as well, so that the impact from from ideas. So we would, depending on the value driver, that our customer has been sold against, and has been identified as the real pain, success will measure the outcome against one of those three things.
David Vogelpohl 10:30
So your customers have an objective, they’re trying to achieve something by using your platform. And in your case, you’re focusing on employee engagement, engagement and transformation and business improvement. And I think, you know, especially for a lot of companies that might be earlier in and haven’t built up, you know, extensive practices here, it sounds like you’re, you’re investing in their use and success in the product that in so in other words, if they had, if you had very little support tickets, that wouldn’t be enough, because even though they might be able to use it, they might not be finding success with it. So then you start to ask like, Well, why does it matter to invest in this? Like, what does it help in terms of like, in general, or Sideways 6 specific like ARR? For both, you know, your ability to retain and grow customers, and then also maybe even your ability to acquire new customers, why does it matter, to invest in customer success? So
Jake Dipple 11:32
I, I love this question. And if you look on LinkedIn, and the sort of thing influencing that you typically see across ces these days, there’s a belief that customer success department is absolutely integral to increasing ARR and having a positive net retention rate. There’s a guy that I follow who actually believe a lot of what he says I could Dave Jackson, he talks about the concept of customer led growth. And anyone in the business can contribute to customer growth. But the idea around customer success being an integral part of that is that we can be the voice of the customer, we can understand the key buying personas of our technology, the key pains that they experienced, and the key gains that they need to achieve, and the key technological capabilities that they need to adopt in order to to positively impact what it is that they’re trying to do to overcome the pain and to see, and to see the gain. So investing in success can be investing in your customer success, which can be one thing, and getting your teams to collaborate together, or investing in a customer success team, which acts as the focal point for that activity to be the voice of the customer insight. Now, customer success is typically held accountable for retention rates, and for they are now one of the things that we one of the things that is absolutely paramount, in order to achieve that is to understand what I call the three V’s. So there’s create key three key values that are typical, and critical to customer success, which is value identification. So what is the key value or gain that needs to be delivered? And what why have they bought your technology? That’s the first V the second V is value realization. So how do we get them from A to B to C to ultimately X? What does the journey look like? What are the skills that they need to acquire along the way, what technology of yours that they need to leverage to achieve this, and then value education, which is the final V, which is who in their business, who in our customers business, need to stay informed regularly of the value that this, this platform is delivering. And so when it comes to renewal, you’ve identified you’ve realized and you’ve educated on the value they’ve delivered. And that means that the outcome that you’re driving is ultimately is hopefully a successful renewal. But also the, the potential for growth, if you’re driving through adoption, barriers, and proving value against that. Now, if your customers are happy and achieving, they’re likely to also be vocal about us, they’re likely to speak to peers, they’re likely to, you know, be very vocal on other forums and channels about the work that you’re doing with them, which can lead to what we’re starting to call Customer Success qualified leads. So if you’re delivering value if you’re delighting your customers or they’re satisfied with your offering, there’s a huge opportunity to track and monitor the customer success quality At least now we’ve got SQL. So we’ve got MQLs. But I think there is an emerging trend for C SQL S, which helps customer success be more, you know, rewarded accountable responsible for the new revenue. Yeah.
David Vogelpohl 15:16
And we see customer success being a huge driver for the most successful companies like we touched on in our, in our our earlier, net revenue retention, the outcome of your cancels downgrades upgrades and new customers. And, you know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about how you think about customer success, because I often think people don’t buy products, they buy outcomes. Yes. And if they can use your product, but don’t get their outcome, your product didn’t work. And so it sounds like your philosophy is a lot around focusing around what is that outcome they bought? And how can we help them deliver, you know, deliver on it. And then using that as a driver? One thing I didn’t hear you talk about was upgrades. And I’m sure that’s part of your story. But is it? Is it more than just retention? I know, you talked about customer success, qualified leads in terms of like customer referrals, I think that’s a great way to think about it. Yeah. Is customer success also about, you know, helping folks find upgraded products that could also find them additional success?
Jake Dipple 16:24
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think from from my perspective, the key is to, is to go back to that customer centricity. So customer success. We know our customers, we should be understanding what it is they’re trying to achieve a surface level, but you know, who they are? What are their threat? What are the competitive threats? What are the trends that they’re seeing in their industry? What are some of the things that are impacting them? What are they trying to achieve? If you’ve got an understanding of of their goals, you can also then map additional functionality and additional capabilities to help support that. And that’s where the upgrade or the upsell becomes much more consultative and much more based on an address need than further realization of value than it has if it’s just a feature versus function. So it goes
David Vogelpohl 17:19
oh, sorry, to interrupt, I was just gonna say. So that makes sense on the upgrade path. And I’m gonna kind of switch gears a little bit though, in that in that same vein, so when there’s capabilities that aren’t available in your product stack? I’m just curious what role Customer Success plays in product innovation and value. And we all have experienced, I think like the the support product asks where like, you need to fix this. People complain about it too much. But how does Customer Success play? Maybe a more kind of an eighth say higher level? Because those are really important tickets. And that’s people’s roadmaps. But how does it drive product innovation and value? Do you think?
Jake Dipple 17:59
Right, I love that question, actually. And I does go back to and I hope I don’t sound like a broken record. But it does go back to the importance of customer centricity. And see is playing an integral role in being able to educate internal teams, on the customers pains and gains. So if we know their pains, if we know their requirements, their use cases, their product utilization, how they’re using it, their ticket volume, their MPs, we can channel this information properly back into our company, and act as the sort of owner of that information flow, which helps us build a better product. So we’re addressing the needs of the customers, we can design to design better services. So support is one angle product is the other. But there’s also a services element here, which how do we maybe plug either technology or people or process gaps with services, which can then help us help our customers deliver. But if we can also share the learnings of a subset of customers that other customers are experiencing versus another subset of customers, we can also help the maturity of of us that are less mature customers by sharing best case examples by sharing how people are using it. And sort of by building that network of customers, I think that also helps as well. Not a great articulation of the end there. I’ll do a bit of a wave but but I do think that having the finger on the customer success having the finger on the pulse of the industry, the trends that we’re seeing what our competitors are doing or what our customers competitors doing, maybe what they’re selling into customers, then we’re at that critical intersection and we can be vital, a vital cog in sharing that insight back into the business to help us innovate our products, innovate our offering, and helping our customers reach their desired outcomes.
David Vogelpohl 19:52
Yeah, it’s such an interesting position to be in because as I mentioned before, support knows what’s broken and what needs to get fixed. product will often go forth and research and interview. And I feel like you only learned so much. And there’s exercises that when you’re, you know, I don’t know, like just like, shoulder against the grindstone helping someone achieve an outcome and having that relationship and an ongoing business relationship relative to how they’re using their product to achieve outcomes. That seems like a really interesting perspective that I could see a lot of product and engineering teams getting a lot of value out of seeing. And I know that that’s a voice that, you know, there’s these tug of war voices and the product innovation and direction. But I could see where that CS position is incredibly valuable, in that that conversation. Is that what you’ve experienced, I’m assuming being head of CES, you must think that but —
Jake Dipple 20:58
I totally agree. And, and one of the things that we’re trying to get better at you mentioned products and engineering, one of the things that we’re trying to get better at is exposing product engineering to our customers, it helps build empathy for, for their pain to help build their knowledge, it helps get them better accustomed to hearing sort of what our customers are trying to do. And that can only be a good thing. And I think getting our getting our, our product engineering teams, in front of customers more is definitely something that can help bridge that gap as well.
David Vogelpohl 21:32
Yeah, I worked at a WordPress company. And we would ask some people at different candidates when they started, had you ever built a WordPress site? Many people would say yes. And then I would say, Have you ever built a WordPress site for money? In other words, something was really on the line. And I think CES has such a great point of view on that, you know, sitting next to customers and helping them achieve those, you know, higher level objectives. So that’s pretty cool. Okay, so let’s talk about marketing. Now. I think everybody on their website says we have great support, and we have a maybe I haven’t seen actually a lot of references to a customer success team. Maybe that’s an opportunity for folks. But how do you feel like customer success can help drive marketing, to both drive obviously, new ARR, but also better customer experiences, when they get on board you talked about like the promise and the delivery, how does CS interact with all that on the marketing side?
Jake Dipple 22:29
So the simplest way is through is through better storytelling. So we work really closely with the marketing team here at Sideways 6. And what we’re trying to do is educate externally on some of the great things that are happening across across our customers, across their journeys across their successes. And we’ve got some wildly successful customers that have been doing some brilliant things within idea management. I mentioned Marks and Spencers I mentioned Balfour Beatty, I mentioned Nestle, there’s a whole host of others, Taylor and Francis that are starting on their journey. Virgin Media, oh two, which have had a lot of success with the initial rollout of their, of their employee ideas program. So a lot of it is about working with Martin to help share the success stories of what these customers are achieving and how they’re doing it. And that, of course, can lead to, you know, MQLs, opportunities for sales, etc. In a more complex way, if the simple way is storytelling, that’s not simply the way because a lot of works got into by our customers to achieve what they’ve achieved. But in a more complex way, in terms of how we work with marketing, we’re constantly assessing our, our ICPs, you know, our ideal customer profiles, who they are, what their characteristics, you know, where they sit in their organization, what are their key, you know, key goals, what are their key pains, and this constant reassessment of what our customers are achieving. And hype and validating against a hypothesis really helps us get really clear on those value drivers, and who those value drivers would resonate with. So we’re targeting the right people with the right message and the right solution. So that’s really what we’re doing. But that clear focus on on ideal customer profiles, that clear focus on value drivers. It also helps bring in then great fit customers. So great, their customers are much more likely to have a great customer experience because what you’re offering meets their needs. So we’re constantly refining that and find that back to marketing, which is finding that back to sales, we get much better customers that are much more right size for our product, which means that we’ll be able to deliver those outcomes that they need, which means that we will then be much more successful as a partnership. So those two key ways I’d say,
David Vogelpohl 24:52
how do you manage it if there’s a new vein of effort marketing is going after that put was in a new set of customers that you discover aren’t that great. But he’ll excuse me greatly aligned to your ICP or how you help customers find success. How do you communicate that back? And how do you adjust? I mean, without going too deep, of course?
Jake Dipple 25:15
No, of course. So I think that constant feedback loop is, is critical. We do your team retros, we do churn retros. So if we start to see a customer segment or a particular set of customers, leave us it’s really important that we understand through the funnel, what’s happened, what we can learn and how we can incorporate. And it can be ICP definition, it can be the wrong customer, it can be, you know, the wrong onboarding process, it can be other things. But that constant learning through retrospectives, and through feedback loops is really important, but critically as well sharing vulnerability. I think one of the good things that Sideways 6 is great at is there’s no blame culture here. Everyone’s trying to support the growth of this company. And if there’s something that we’ve experimented with, and it hasn’t worked great, we hold our hands up and we say, we tried, what did we learn? How do we move forward? Which I really liked? I think that’s the right spirit.
David Vogelpohl 26:18
Excellent. Well, that’s great to hear. Okay, so we’ve talked about customer success kind of writ large. We’ve talked about its influence and role and product and engineering and in marketing. Are there any other areas of the business you feel customer success has a big impact on?
Jake Dipple 26:38
I would I we touched on services. But I think that interrelationship between the services offering support, and products are probably where we spend a lot of our time post sales, with those teams understanding how we all work together to offer a great customer experience. But we’re also to the point just now trying to get better at sharing that knowledge back in with sales. So can they we can help them sell better against pain points and gain opportunities, we can help them identify customers that are great fit. We really do touch every organization in the business, which consists of product and engineering, services, sales, marketing, product, and people and sort of interacting with with the different people across the organization as well. So that’s within Sideways 6. I’m sure there are better examples in, in in other companies, but yeah, excellent.
David Vogelpohl 27:38
Excellent. Now, of course, I’d like to know we talked earlier, we’re kind of intro the episode around some of the unconventional ways you go about getting customers to love the company and love the platform. And it reminds me a little bit of marketing quote by a gentleman named Mark McCormack and it says all things being equal, people will do business with a friend, all things being unequal people will still do business with a friend. And it sounds like you’re taking some approaches that help you earn some friends along the way, not that you would give them an equal product, I guess. But what are some of the unconventional ways you’ve gotten customers to find success like success was Sideways 6 and love the brand?
Jake Dipple 28:24
So that’s an excellent question. I really like that quote as well. I think we we recognize that that customer happiness is really important that every tech company that I’ve worked at, there has been a measure on customer happiness or customer satisfaction, which is critical, but that, that playing on that sort of emotion of getting our customers to love us is really important. There’s one way that’s done which is through helping them conventionally deliver on the outcomes they need to from leveraging our technology. But unconventionally, some of the stuff that we’ve done in the past has been you know, hosting hosting customer get together so roundtables so getting our customers to speak to each other and build a build a network of, of a network of champions of Sideways 6 that understand what we do that are thought leaders within the idea and innovation space. We also talk a lot about like, we talk a lot about helping our customers achieve their desired outcomes. That’s typically a customer level. That’s getting them to, you know, cut costs, increase revenue, protect brand, which are in very important but quite impersonal Gods so I think we all take joy as a customer success as customer success individuals when we see our champions and end users progress or achieve or get recognition for the work that we’re helping them do. So help thing our customers get new jobs, helping our customers get promoted, helping our customers self promote, on LinkedIn through case studies through webinars, that’s really, really rewarding for a customer success manager to see the people that believe in your software that achieve what they are, you know, personally trying to achieve. And we’ve helped in the past, we’ve helped customers that may have fallen on on hard times, they may have, you know, been impacted by a restructuring, but because of the network of, of champions that we’ve built up, and then the network of alumni that are associated with Sideways 6, we’ve been able to sort of, you know, recommend them into somewhere or help them help them get another job. But one of the more personally rewarding examples of supporting our customers and going above and beyond, which I think is really where that, that you know, that love or that that and interaction with a customer can come from is one of our one of our big customers, we’re always hosting a two day workshop off site for 7080 people to educate them and to upskill them on the next year’s plans for their idea program. And we actually, they asked if we could help. So we did a presentation we supported with some, some merchandise, some sort of tailor merchandise we gave, we hosted an award, we contributed towards that. Or to support our customer to deliver a great event. And again, making them successful and seeing them be successful. But helping them was probably one of the highlights that I’ve had this year, and doing things like that, that have really helped build the connection between two different companies.
David Vogelpohl 31:47
So it’s an empowering thing, helping others, it really puts a fire in your gut, if you will. But it sounds like you know, a big part of what you’re focused on. And I, in my view, and the orgs that I’ve seen very successful have followed similar suits, which is focusing on those outcomes. I mean, at the end of the day, we don’t sell products, we sell outcomes. And if you lose sight of that, then you building the wrong type of company. So that’s really interesting to hear. Okay, so we’ve cut or covered a lot of topics today, if the audience remembered only one thing you said today, what would it be?
Jake Dipple 32:28
Well, not at the first thing that I ordered was, I bought in line with Apple. I think for me, it goes back to and I hope I did it justice. But Dave Jackson, sort of, you know, belief in customer led growth, like success teams. These days, you’re either on one side or the other when it comes to responsibility with regards to our but I don’t think success departments can get complacent or arrogant with their role within an organization. And it’s sort of essential that we need to be responsible for driving positive net retention rates, and growing our customers and showcasing that we can do that. And that we can be that growth engine for our for our businesses. And I think without that focus and accountability, I think customer success could quickly become seen as a nice to have. And it’s absolutely essential that we’re not we are very much a need to have because we can drive net retention rate because we can drive outcomes for our customers because we can shape the product and the innovation that we need in our business to win against the competition. So that would probably be my overarching takeaway. I hope that that. Yeah,
David Vogelpohl 33:44
that’s a great point to end on. And I think those are such massive drivers in business when you have over 100% Net Revenue retention, which customer success plays a huge role and you can spend more money to acquire customers, you instantly get higher valuations. And if you know, the KPI that aren’t observed, don’t move. And so if you don’t have someone focusing on the objectives that your customers are trying to achieve, I don’t think he can build a super scalable business. But that’s super, that’s an awesome point to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jake.
Jake Dipple 34:21
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
David Vogelpohl 34:24
Excellent. Well, if you’d like to learn more about what Jake is up to, you can visit Sideways 6. That’s the number six dot com. Thanks, everyone for joining us today for Growth Stage. If you’d like to learn more about FastSpring and how we can help you sell your digital products globally while staying automatically tax compliant, and keep your focus on your products visit fastspring.com. Thanks, everyone for joining.
Producer 34:48
Thank you for listening to this episode of Growth Stage. To learn more about FastSpring and the services we offer, visit fastspring.com.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
