Psychology of Customer Success

The Human Problem with Customer Success

• Rachel Provan • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

Wouldn't it be nice if customers would just do what we tell them to do so they can get what they say they want?

Unfortunately, humans don't work that way.  For better and worse, we're much more complicated. 

Dive into the fascinating fields of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and cognitive behavioral psychology to understand why people do the things they do, what motivates them, and how to use that to create positive outcomes for your customers, your company, and yourself.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL KNOW: 

  • Why your customers can't absorb all the information you're giving them
  • The reason many Founder/CEOs struggle to understand the value of Customer Success. 
  • How to drive adoption by understanding Dopamine and Habit Formation

OTHER LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: 

Mini Habits - Steven Guise
Atomic Habits - James Clear
The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

🎬 This content was edited by Lifetime Value Media.

Learn more at: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com



++++NEW FREE RESOURCE++++

💎 The Ultimate Onboarding Checklist for Customer Success Leaders - The Step-by-Step Checklist to demonstrate your leadership, value, and strategic expertise.


WORK WITH RACHEL:

🧑🏻‍🎓 The CS Leadership Academy


CONNECT WITH RACHEL

Follow at:

LinkedIn
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube

WEBSITE

https://provansuccess.com




Speaker 1:

Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do. So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provan, cs Leadership Coach, award-winning CS strategist and certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership and mindset, using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success, where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics and executive presence. We'll dig into subjects like the helper personality, how thought errors like it's just easier if I do it keep your department stuck in reactive mode, and how cognitive bias can really screw up your customer journey, plus much more. Make sure to subscribe on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon and here's to your success.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Psychology of Customer Success, and today I want to go into kind of the basis of what this podcast is about. So I think one of the biggest mistakes that happens in CS not just by customer success leaders but sort of everyone who's perceiving CS as a whole is thinking it's going to be a lot simpler than it actually is, and I think that's because we're expecting it to make sense. You know we're expecting humans to make sense. We're designing our CS strategies as though they're going to be straightforward, when it's kind of like we're trying to design it for a computer. You know something that's repeatable and predictable the same thing is going to happen every time you write that same kind of code for any computer. It all speaks the same language, it all behaves the same way. You know garbage in, garbage out, you put good code in, you're going to get. You know you're going to get the result you want if you know how to code. But it's predictable. And we're trying to create a strategy for our customers that is predictable, that gets predictable results, and there definitely are ways to do that. Yes, there will be some margin of error, but there are ways to do that.

Speaker 1:

But we're not considering a lot of different factors. You know computers even though they might not seem that way to those who you know aren't engineers, like I'm not doesn't seem particularly simple to me, but compared to humans, honestly they're not that sophisticated and there's not as many things you have to take into account. For example, computers don't have hidden motivations, they don't get tired, they don't have fear, they aren't resistant to new lines of code or they're not self protective like, oh, you've never done that with me before, I don't know if that's going to make me self destruct, so no, not going to run that line of code. I'd imagine it would probably be be more difficult to create programs and such if that were the case. And they also don't lie or basically mislead. They don't tend to mislead.

Speaker 1:

A lot of the times we will take what our customers say as face value. You can do that with a computer. You can't necessarily do it with a human, because a human will tell you what you want to hear. A computer will absolutely not do that. Input equals output every time with a computer.

Speaker 1:

Humans are a lot more complicated. They have different perspectives, they have different schemas. So schemas are basically the way that your brain builds itself to make shortcuts Right. So it's, it kind of creates if this than that in computer speak. But it becomes very sure about these things. So you know, based on the way you were raised, the things that you learned, the things that you saw. Different things became objectively true for you than they did for me, than they did for someone you know in a different political part of the country than they did of, perhaps, someone of a different gender perspective is everything with humans, and it's entirely possible for two people to have a completely different perspective and for them both to be right. Given the background and the way they're looking at it, they just might not be able to communicate to the other exactly what it looks like from their point of view. So schemas are your view of the world. Now, for various reasons, mainly having to do with wanting to feel safe and secure, your brain has billions of bits of information coming to it at every single moment. Right, it can't possibly take all of that in, so it takes in only what it considers to be relevant. Now, it's only going to consider something to be relevant if it fits into those existing schemas, and it has a tendency to filter, delete or distort things that fall outside of those schemas because they don't fit into the world view that your brain has.

Speaker 1:

This is all happening without your ever realizing it, and I actually do a little bit of an experiment on my son sometimes to show him how this works because I'll tell him, like you can see something and not really see it, like it won't register with you or you will have seen it a different way. And you know he's eight. So he'll be like, no, no, that's not, that's not possible. I remember everything, I see everything. Okay, you know we'll be walking down the street and I'll say what was the color of that door? Three doors back. You saw it. You know, we walked right past it. I saw you look at it. Actually, what color was it? And he'll break out into a smile because he has no idea. And the reason he has no idea is because the brain decided that little bit of information was insignificant, he didn't need it. There's enough that is going to be going on in his brain. So it immediately disregarded it, deleted it and wasn't there anymore. Yes, he saw it and now it's gone. And that really colors our perception of the world and, what's important, so does things like fear and the survival mechanism.

Speaker 1:

Now, when your customers are looking at the software that you want them to be paying attention to, you want them to install it, their attention isn't locked there, right, like you've seen a PowerPoint or you've seen somebody try and teach you a software. You don't retain every single bit of information the way a computer would, even though you heard it, unless your memory is very special. You're not going to retain absolutely everything you hear. Like you can listen to this podcast again, you'll probably get more out of it the second time because there will be bits that your brain just went off and la, la, la and for a little bit and you missed a couple of things. And that's fine, that's how it works. But these things have to be factored in when you're setting your CS strategy.

Speaker 1:

A lot of CS doesn't take the human element into consideration. You know they wanted the product, they bought the product. We showed them how to use the product. Success right and not quite. You know, adoption isn't even listed in the traditional customer journey. It's all just assumed. It goes from onboarding to maybe optimization, but often not just like usage, and then renewal, expansion, advocacy, all definitely going to happen, right and it just. It's not quite that easy. But you know the traditional customer success model and what I'm still hearing from so many startups of what they're expecting their CS department to do is, you know, onboarding, focus on onboarding, which I agree very important, but focus on onboarding. Then have QBRs with the bigger clients, have some sort of digital strategy for the smaller clients or do nothing with them. They should be fine.

Speaker 1:

But you know, onboarding QBRs and then QBRs can be for upsell and renewal. That is all very much based on what the company wants for itself, but it has nothing to do with what the customer wants for themselves. This is one of the reasons that I get very cranky when people talk about changing the name of customer success, because often when they do that, they take the customer right out of it and it's all right there in the name, right, customer success. We are there to make the customer successful with our product, not successful by our terms, successful by their terms. So what I mean by that is achieving their business outcome. So basically, yes, the results of customer success are renewal, expansion and advocacy, absolutely, but they're not automatic. They are the results of getting the customer their desired outcome, their business outcome that they were looking for when they bought the product.

Speaker 1:

Because they didn't get a product, because, oh, that looks cool and you know, I want to use that as much as I possibly can. I want all the bells and whistles and I just want to be able to do all the things that that product can do, as cool as it may be, people just don't buy products for that reason. They buy products to solve a problem or to take advantage of an opportunity. Typically, that's going to be save money, make money, increase efficiency. You know, an increasing efficiency is really just another way to increase the amount of money you have, because the efficiency is you know the amount of time that the people you're paying are spending on something. You're not spending as much time on something that dollar per hour can be spent on something else and you can be accomplishing more. So the way I like to look at it and the way I like to explain it to people is the renewal, expansion advocacy.

Speaker 1:

All that is what your company wants, because as a CS leader and as a CSM as well, you have to hold in equal weights what the customer wants and what your company wants. They both have needs right and you have to find a way to meet them both at the same time. It's not a zero sum game. It's not where somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose, and if you look at it that way, that is very dangerous for your career. You have to find a way. Ok, how do we make the customer successful and how do we make that a win for us as well?

Speaker 1:

So it's finding that sort of compromise and what I found is the whole first part of that customer journey that post sale customer journey, is sort of the hard part on our side. It's the efforting part where we have to understand what they want. We have to teach them how to use the product, the onboarding. We've got to get them to an initial point of success, that first value, where they feel like it's worth continuing to put in the effort to. You know like this is going to work. I see the reason I'm onboard. I'm going to keep using it until I get the results I want, because I see that that's possible right. And then once they hit that result that they want, that they get the result they were looking for when they bought the product. That's sort of like when they get to the top of the mountain. You got to spend all that time climbing up the mountain to get them to their desired outcome and then you get to ski down the other side.

Speaker 1:

The rest of it becomes really easy the renewal, the expansion, the advocacy, because you've proven that you deliver value and that continuing to invest in you or investing more in you will continue to deliver value. And even more than that, the second order revenue of people telling others about how fantastic you are, you know, drives new customers. It almost becomes new sales and marketing for you. That's free. So there's tons of value in CS. But to assume that there's no real effort on our side where we have to meet the customer halfway there, that's where I think a lot of people miss it.

Speaker 1:

Now, where it gets even more tricky is there's not just one outcome, right? I mean, maybe there is. If you have a very simple product and you're maybe dealing with one type of customer solving one type of problem, but you're probably not necessarily like a SaaS model, then you're probably a very inexpensive B2C. So in traditional customer success, you're most likely going to have to deal with not just one outcome. We think of the outcome of the executive sponsor, because of course, that's important. But in order to get that, you also have to get the outcomes of the key stakeholders, because they're going to want something different. It's going to take something different for them to be motivated to show up and prioritize your product every day in their life.

Speaker 1:

So we've got the executive sponsor. They want something, probably financial. The key stakeholder wants something else, probably for their department to do things more quickly or to look good to their boss and your end users, the people who have to actually use the product. They probably don't particularly care. I mean, I'm sure they care about the bottom line of the company, but they probably don't see how it's in any way tied to your product and to them. It's probably just kind of annoying to have to figure out something, figure out a new tool that they don't see, a real reason that they have to learn.

Speaker 1:

It was easier to just do what they were familiar with, so there has to be something in it for them as well. There has to be a way that it's making their life easier, their job easier. What can it do that they couldn't do before without the tool or with a different tool? So you have to actually almost work backwards. You have to work first with the end user, because if they're not using it, you're probably not going to get the rest of the results. So you have to be able to be clear in your messaging to the end user of how this is going to make their life better, and you have to be coordinating with the key stakeholder of yes, we're working towards the outcome that your boss wanted, here's what we've been doing with it, here's what you can tell him or her that's going so well, and what you had to do with it to solve the greater business problems. And again, the outcome is never going to be. I want this program so I can use all the fun bells and whistles.

Speaker 1:

If we don't get the outcome that the customer wants, we will fail to get the results that we need as a company, from CS, from those customers. The whole point of CS is to systematize those outcomes and a predictable way to get that customer from here, where they started, to there, that result they want, where they want to be. And it goes beyond just teaching them okay, here's how you get from here to there. This is what success plans really are. It's the combination of okay, this is what you physically do, it's the how to in our product to get from here to there. But it's also motivating people, staying on top of them, almost project managing it and keeping everybody on track, because there's going to be resistance to do that. But here's where the problems come in. So, just because a person wants an outcome does not mean they're going to do the work to get there.

Speaker 1:

Now let me tell you what I mean. So I'm going to use the embarrassing example of me and the gym here, because I just, you know, it's something that I battled with most of my life. I do not like going to a gym. I have found ways that I like to exercise, well enough, but it's just, you know, not my favorite thing. So, that said, every you know January, I get targeted between, you know, december 25th and January 1st.

Speaker 1:

The algorithms know me so well. They're like she's going to be thinking about what she wants to do next year and what she wants to change and how her life is going to be better. We're going to show her lots of ads for gyms, you know, especially ones in her area, and you know I get sitting there and seeing them. Things are going to be different this year, and here's why they're going to be different this year. Reason number one, two, three, whatever, I don't know, like I'm using a different hair dye this year. I don't know. You know, for me this year it's like oh well, my business is in a different place than it was last year, so maybe it'll be a little bit less hectic. You know, never mind, it's me that is the one that makes it as hectic as it is. But you know, every year I buy that gym membership or not every year, but plenty of years I have bought that gym membership and you know it's because I.

Speaker 1:

You know there are reasons. I wanted, I want to feel healthier, I want to look better, I want to just have more energy and you know, I'm not 25 anymore. I got to take care of my body, like there's lots of reasons for me to do this and I do want the results of it. But here's the thing it's cold in January. It's also dark. This is not the most motivating thing in the world. So for me it looks something like this.

Speaker 1:

So the first week or two I go I'm like, oh, this is so cool. Look at me, I'm doing the thing, I'm getting up early, I'm going, and then maybe after two weeks or so, it's like I have specific days that I go, right, you know, three, four times a week, and then one day, you know I won't want to get up, for whatever reason, I'll feel more tired. I stayed up late. Oh, I have such a busy day today and I'm not the best at motivation. I don't make the best decisions when I'm like half asleep and trying not to get out of bed. But I'll be sitting there thinking, you know like well, you know today's a really big day. You know, the body really does need rest. That's when muscles repair themselves. So it will actually be better for me if I don't go to the gym today. I will be getting fitter by not going to the gym today and it will be good for work because you know, I've got a lot on my plate today and it'll be fine. I'll just go tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

And then tomorrow comes. And you know, yesterday was a really big day, it was really busy and also it's sleeting now. I mean, that's, I don't want to get sick and not be able to go to the gym, right, so just probably just better to put it off. And then the next day my kid is sick and has the sniffles because he went out in, you know, in the sleet, right, and it just seems to go that way, right.

Speaker 1:

And then all of a sudden you're kind of out of the habit. I mean to be honest, like it kind of hurts. It takes a while to enjoy exercise and you're not enjoying yourself. It isn't making any difference, that you can see, and even though I know intellectually that, no, I'm not going to have a sex pack in two weeks and if you are hush, I don't want to hear from you because I am not and it still just kind of feels like you know I'm putting a lot of effort in here and it doesn't really feel like it's doing anything. So why am I going to continue to torture myself? You know, and once you're out of the habit like that one little week of you know things getting in my way it's far, far too easy to just drop it rather than have to face the mental hurdles of I don't want to do this, I don't enjoy this, it's not convenient for me, but I still really want the results. Right Now that's going on with a lot of your clients. That said, this is for something that I saw out myself personally and I wanted the results and I felt really frickin motivated.

Speaker 1:

Have you in your life to think if there's a time where you've ever tried to get someone else to change something, a habit, a way they behave, something that they do maybe a spouse, maybe a partner, heck, maybe even a pet How'd that go, because I can tell you in my experience, trying to change another person, if it wasn't their idea and they're not super motivated, it's not very likely going to happen. People don't tend to change very easily and it really has to be their idea and it's going to take a lot. Now we're not even trying to change ourselves. We're not even trying to change someone that happens to love us. We're trying to change people who owe us nothing, these end users. They personally haven't paid us anything.

Speaker 1:

What's in it for them to spend their time learning a new software? That's probably not what their KPIs are, what they're going to be measured on. It's probably something that helps a part of their job, but it's unlikely that it is their whole job. Why are they going to be efforting and spending their time on this instead of, I guarantee you, the thousand other things that are on their plate that day? It's hard when you start to look at it that way and then having to do this for the end users, for the key stakeholder, for the executive sponsor, and motivating all these people and getting them to change, and oh my gosh, how are we going to do that you start to really get a sense of what you're up against here. The other aspect that a lot of people don't think about consciously is that there's a resistance to this. I just told you about this and you might not be jumping for joy.

Speaker 1:

Let's say that we know that the customer bought our software not because they just happened to love pressing buttons, but because they're trying to achieve a business outcome, like they want to make more money in their campaigns by using our software. But wait a minute, I can't guarantee our software will do that. It might help, but there's other factors I can't control, right? What if I can't see if it's doing what they need them to do? I don't have insights into their financials, I don't have insights into the inner workings of their company, and I'm not going to If I can't see whether that's actually doing what they need it to or not. I don't want to admit that, because what if I admit that and the C-suite says well then, what the hell are you doing here? You're saying we have to achieve these outcomes and then you're saying we can't know if we're achieving these outcomes. It all gets pretty scary, right. So it's a lot easier to just say yes, sir or ma'am, and just be like okay, onboard QBRs, and you're still not going to get the results that you're hoping for that way. Now the C-suite is most likely to be resistant in their own ways to this idea, because a lot of them actually do think like computers, especially if you have a founder CEO. Okay. So To them, hearing that there's going to be new ons and it's you know, frankly, it's not going to be as easy as they'd hoped it was going to be. It's going to take longer, it's going to take more work, it's going to be more complicated than they initially thought. That's going to cause some disappointment.

Speaker 1:

A lot of people hope that CS is going to be this magic bullet, especially right now. They're kind of hoping like oh well, we can't get any new customers right now, or we're having trouble getting new customers right now, but we can sell to our existing customer base, right? Isn't that what CS does? Right, you can fix the economy right? You know you're not part of the same economy that we're part of with trying to get new logos. Surely our current customers aren't experiencing any of the economic tech troubles that anyone else is. It can be disappointing. It's actually something you have to be a little bit careful with when you talk about, because otherwise the C-suite can then say, well, if you can't fix things right away, then you know, kind of never mind, because we don't know how much runway we have left. And that's not a great strategy either, because CS is a long-term growth strategy. It's not that sexy.

Speaker 1:

It's eating your broccoli, right? Yeah, it's fine, you know, but it's just not necessarily going to be the most exciting part of the meal. But it is what is going to make you strong. It is going to have like nutrients and, you know, fiber and it has sure antioxidants and all these things that we need to stay healthy. Now you can't wait until you know it's something that you can't just do it once and you're done. It's something that you have to do consistently. That's kind of annoying, kind of like the exercise that you just have to do consistently because that is how you stay healthy long-term. That's one of the parts of it. You can't wait until you're really sick or you have cancer or something, and then start chowing down on broccoli and thinking it's going to help you. It's too late for broccoli at that point, you know. Yes, there are other things that can help you, but you know, relying on broccoli at the time, for that has probably passed. Now no one really wants to be broccoli, so we need to explain. You know, hey, we're the broccoli, but we also have some chocolate on the side of that. Or you know, we're broccoli with cheese.

Speaker 1:

You know there's some benefits, there's some immediate benefits. It's going to we're going to get some sort of pleasure out of this right away. So there are benefits at every stage of customer success, even when you're starting out, even when you're in that reactive stage. Even just putting bodies on the accounts is going to reduce churn because people are going to get some of their problems solved that before they wouldn't and will talk to customers who maybe aren't that happy but they're not gone Right. So customer success has an immediate benefit. You can always be very clear on that.

Speaker 1:

But when it comes down to actual customer success, actually getting that result that people need and I'm making this as hard as it can possibly be, but it's to show you what you're really dealing with here you know all you have to do is get people a result, get them from A to B. But there is going to be some resistance from them, from you, from the C suite, and you've got to motivate these people and have it be at the top of their list to do what you're asking them to do, even when it's not fun, even when it's boring, even when they have more important things to do. So you have to first speak to. Here's the way we're actually going to fix this. Here's how you're actually going to address it with customers.

Speaker 1:

This is kind of like change management, which sounds really scary. Right, it sounds like we need a management consulting firm and people who wear really expensive suits and have briefcases need to come in and do things. And we have to motivate the right people, as I said, the end users, the key stakeholders and the executive sponsors. Now, we all have too much to do, every single one of us. That is kind of the curse of the modern world. You have to be able to come up with a reason why adopting your product should be at the top of their list.

Speaker 1:

So understand what about this product could get them promoted. What are the key initiatives that their company is trying to work on right now? Most likely, save money, make money, improve productivity or increase security. Those tend to be the things that people talk about at quarterly planning meetings. Those tend to be the OKRs the big rocks If you can tie your product to that, showing how it ties into that, you are already out of the game because you are going to have a way to motivate these people. Marketing is something that you know. I feel like we already have too much to do in CS. But learning, not even marketing, but copywriting understanding how to motivate people to do what you want them to do through your words, through talking about benefits rather than features, through understanding what pain points to highlight and show people how their lives could be different through using your product that can have a huge impact on whether your customers actually take action and learn it. So the way we're going to break this down is it's really just habit formation. And you know, once you know what you want them to do and you can get them motivated to do it, actually getting them to make it part of their life and make it part of their everyday business processes is a matter of habit formation.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you haven't read James Clear's Atomic Habits, I doubt I'm the first person to mention it to you. Go read it, but I'm going to summarize it here, but it's still definitely worth a read. I read a lot about habit formation and how that works in the brain. Charles Doohigg, the Power of Habit also really a great book to check out, and I'll have a link to both of those in the comments, as well as many habits by Stephen Geiss. That's a really good one too, but the basics of it are to create any habit, you have to have a cue.

Speaker 1:

You have to have something that's going to tell people oh, now's the time for me to do that thing, that thing that is this new habit. So you need something. You have to tie it to something that already is a part of their life, something that they're already doing every day, you know like. You know, if you want to, you know, start meditating, try meditating while you brush your teeth. You're going to be doing it anyway. It's a cue, right. So it's. Having the cue is the first thing, and then the next thing is make it as easy and small as possible and tie it to a reward.

Speaker 1:

A lot of what we run up against when we're learning something new or building a new habit is overdoing it. You know and that's one of my key problems at the gym, you know, at the end I'm tired, I'm hurting, it sucks, I want to go home, it's. You know, it takes a lot to put your shoes on when you know you're going to go and work your body hard for an hour, hour and a half. It's not so hard when you know you're going to go and you know walk for five minutes on treadmill and go home it. You know it's kind of a bit of a ways to drive to do that, but you know that's it's not a big deal.

Speaker 1:

You have to make it so that the activation of using your product there, those first things, those first steps they have to do, are really easy and simple to do, so that they get an immediate win which will tie it to dopamine. And dopamine is sort of like a reward chemical that gets released in your brain. Our phones are very much designed to release dopamine. Same with like the notifications to let you know that like, oh, someone thinks I'm interesting, someone wants me. You know there's possibility here. People are approving of what I said. All of that ties into dopamine. So dopamine is just like a little win. You get dopamine with a little win and that can be like a burst of confetti on the screen being like yes, you've done step one, you've signed in, you're fantastic Doing something like that where they get a little reward, they get celebrated for doing something relatively mundane, makes your product more addictive.

Speaker 1:

Because we don't get a whole lot of gold stars for what we do in life, right, we all have too much to do and we're not getting the validation and the appreciation that we want most of the time. So if your product is something that gives them validation for doing something doable for them, that's going to be very appealing. So you're going to build on those over time. You know it doesn't have to take forever, but just make sure that it's small enough bites that it feels easy and there's some sort of acknowledgement that they've taken the next step. You know like a little smiley face that comes on a checkbox on a to-do list they get to check off. You know, on one side of the screen, people like checking things off a to-do list. It's satisfying. So give them those wins, acknowledge their progress. And I've done this at, you know, I don't know how many companies now five, six and it has increased adoption massively, like before where we were just going from, you know, onboarding to QBRs. I often saw, you know, like 80% retention. You know, maybe 75% retention and when I would implement this it would go up to 90% retention. 95% retention, right, and upsells would go up too. So another way to look at it and to see how this sort of tiny, tiny habit or atomic habit type of thing builds up.

Speaker 1:

Going back to the fitness model of it, I got in the best shape of my life by doing one set up a day. No, I didn't do one set up a day forever, but I made that my goal. All right, set up crunch, whatever you want to call it. I made it my goal that if I did one set up a day, I win at my fitness goals. That is all I have to do to mark it off on my list and say I did it. Now, why? Why one set up? Well, because on my worst day, like if I have the flu, if someone breaks up with me, you know, am I going to want to do it? No, but I still can, and I did.

Speaker 1:

And the funny thing is, when I had gotten on the floor already to do my one set up, most of the time when I was there, I was like, well, I'm here already, I might as well, you know, do a set or a couple, you know. So I do 10, 20, whatever, and then, over time, I was like what if I did a push up, since I'm already on the floor, you know? And then it became set up some push ups and then, all right, well, how about when I get up, I do some squats. And before I knew it I was doing, you know, like a 30, 40 minute routine that built up over the course of a year. You know, even if you just did, you know, one set up, one crunch, one push up, and you upped that by one a week by the end of the year, you still have a really solid, kind of long, probably, routine that feels like nothing, that felt like no effort to add each week because you're adding one right.

Speaker 1:

So, whether it's the activation energy of just getting started with something or just starting with the tiniest bite and being able to say that's when I did that, I got it, I don't have to do anymore to make it a win for the day, that was a hell of a lot more effective and a lot less expensive than going to the gym for me. So, look, there will be resistance to this, because it is more work than just onboard, plus QBR, plus a renewal conversation, but it's also a lot more effective. So do the same thing for yourself. Take this step by step, bite by bite, and reward yourself. You don't have to do this entire mapping out of every single step that everybody needs all at once. Just pick one stage, pick onboarding what's the very first thing they need to do. You know what's the very first thing we need to do. Just do that in an hour.

Speaker 1:

You know I'm constantly telling the people that I coach, whether it's in one-on-one or in CS Leadership Academy just take one hour a day to work on strategic work like this and that's all you need. Need to be working on this eight hours a day? You can't be. You probably feel like you don't have any time to work on this, even if it's a half an hour a day. Just small bites, and pat yourself on the back when you do it or check something off on a list. Just small bites plus rewards is what gets it done.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you want to actually have time to do this, you are going to have to stop saying yes to every little bit of work that comes your way. You can't keep on taking on unnecessary work. Now you may be thinking I don't take on unnecessary work. Every bit of my work is very necessary. Thank you very much. That's fine.

Speaker 1:

Tune in next time and you know, see if you still agree with that on the next episode of Psychology of Customer Success, called it's Just Easier If I Do it. Never thought that before. Right, I'm certainly guilty of it anyway. So if you liked this, please go to Apple, rate it five stars, give a little review there. Even if it's just, you know, one or two words, that would mean the world to me.

Speaker 1:

I know all these podcasts ask you to do that. There's a reason. It makes a huge difference and I need to know if you want me to keep doing this, because it's a lot of work. I'm really excited about it. I want to do it, but you know I need my little hit of dopamine. So if you enjoyed this, if you want me to keep doing it, you want more? Go click that five stars, say a word or two, you know, and and let me know what your thoughts were, how you liked it. I hope this was helpful. You know. Tune in next time for Psychology of Customer Success. Take care of yourself, get some rest and make sure to share this with your CS. Bestie, I'll see you next time and here's to your success.