Speaker 1 (00:00.194)
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Hello everyone, I'm your host Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice and actual insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams.

So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey. And I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks, and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years.

Speaker 1 (02:16.982)
And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in, and let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.

Speaker 1 (02:40.248)
Welcome back to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, the go-to show for CSMs and CS leaders who want to drive real impact, not just check boxes. Today's guest is someone whose name you've probably seen across your LinkedIn feed if you follow European customer success trends. Sean Reed is an award-winning customer success leader based in Ireland with leadership experience at HubSpot, Personio, and Tive.

His thought leadership has made him a recognized voice in customer success across Europe and his latest innovation, the renewal probability score has recently nominated him for best innovation in CX at the 2025 Irish CX Impact Awards. In this episode, we are diving into a conversation every CS Pro needs to hear, which is why your green accounts might actually be at risk.

And yes, we're gonna challenge the idea that green accounts always means good. And Sean is gonna walk us through what most CS teams are missing when it comes to customer health scores and renewal forecasting. So let's dive into it.

Welcome, Sean, to the podcast. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today. I know that there's probably very few people that don't know who you are because of all of your accolades and being known on LinkedIn. But for my listeners who maybe don't know who you are, do you mind sharing a little bit more about your background and who you are and your journey and customer success?

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks so much for having me. And I feel very humbled for that introduction. So my name is Sean Reid. I've been in CS now for over a decade. Based out of Ireland, my journey here is that I'm a marketer by background and I fell into customer success by a complete accident by joining HubSpot. It was back when they were hiring folks with marketing backgrounds to join the CS org.

Speaker 2 (04:29.452)
I didn't really know what customer success was. I just knew I wanted to be in a part of this company because of the marketing product and what they did and very quickly fell in love with customer success and just haven't looked back at all. in that time, I've been leading CS orgs with startups in Europe and North America and really helping to define how CS can be a revenue driver for these businesses.

And when I'm not talking about customer success, can sometimes be found moonlighting as a standard comedian and sometimes can be found just taking photos of the hundreds of toys that are surrounding me right now.

love that. Amazing. This could be a fun take on, I was like, I'm just thinking about how much comedy we can maybe squeeze into this episode. But I love your story. I also love that everyone in customer success starts in a different and unique way. I have had marketers on the podcast before, but it's interesting to see more and more people come from other SaaS or tech careers into customer success. So you mentioned HubSpot. Obviously HubSpot being a marketing tool makes complete sense.

What made you take that initial leap and start working in customer sets? Why not stay on the marketing track?

It was what excited me when marketing was, I love making an impact. love creating content and I love just seeing what you can do with a stage. But I realized very quickly inside a customer success that why would I limit myself to working with one business? As a CSM, I could work with an entire book of businesses and talk about so many different marketing strategies on a daily basis. And that excited me. It gave me an opportunity to grow myself and to learn more by getting so much exposure.

Speaker 2 (06:11.054)
And I really realized while doing that, that I loved the conversations. I loved what we were doing to lead with value and to see the success stories come out of our customers. And that's what made me stay is that buzz of having a customer say, I'm missing something. And you work with them for six, seven months on a project. And then for them to turn around and go, I present the disk to my boss and look at the impact we've had. And you can feel proud knowing you're a part of that.

I love that. I also love just that passion and energy behind your voice as you were saying it. I think sometimes in CS, especially in the world we live in right now, it can be very, very easy to get bogged down feeling like, I got to do this other call with this customer or this is going to be a churn or you just feel this pressure as a customer success professional in general. And it's so nice hearing the positives of customer success as I speak to more and more guests on this show, which is really great. And

I think you have a lot of passion for it. You've spent over a decade in it and you've been at some really cool logos as well, HubSpot being one, but Personia being another. I guess what's next or what's your next CS career dream or ambition? You've moved from marketing, you're in CS, you've been in leadership. What's kind of the big next step for you?

I'm definitely staying within CS. I can never see myself in another department at all. it's no disrespect. I've had plenty of opportunities to even join traditional GTM works, but CS is where I want to be. For myself, I always have the long-term career goal of being able to be a chief customer officer for a European tech company. I always stand by that Europe has some of the best CS talent you'll ever find.

And I don't think we have enough of a platform. I don't think folks are vocal enough to say like what they're doing. And there's some amazing success stories out there. So if I could lead that for a European company, that's the goal. That's the truth.

Speaker 1 (08:03.96)
I love it. think Europe is really budding in that way as an American and someone who's spent now 14 years in Europe and the UK. It's crazy to see how far the entire industry has come in Europe as a whole, but I do think you're so right. We get under-accredited or maybe just pushed to the side. We're almost like the stepchild. It's like, let's look at Europe as an afterthought. But there is so much a budding SaaS industry out of Europe.

But B, there's so much CS talent out here that I do think gets under appreciated, not looked at close enough, whatever you want to say. I do think there's a lot of talent here and it's really awesome to see Europe grow over the last decade or so, especially in customer success, which again, it's just, it's so exciting to see the industry grow. And I know one of the things that you're super passionate about and you've been nominated for awards in this is just a lot around being able to predict.

and being able to really analyze risk of accounts within customer success and also just being able to be predictable and be profitable and create a probability score that makes sense really for customer success. Because if we're really honest and customer says a lot of our work is very lagging or very much looking back at the last quarter or the last year. And health scores is probably one of those things that sit between looking back and looking forward. And I know you've built a lot.

around health scores in general in your career. So I'm super curious what shaped your thoughts, your views on customer health scoring and customer attention. Cause that's gonna be the meat of the conversation today.

Yeah, for sure. It was my time and house spot as CSM is what kicked it off. We had a health scoring model, which is the exact thing you'd see in so many other orgs. It's the piece of what can the system tell you? But it was all retroactive. Things had happened with your customer's account. Things had happened inside of the software and now you need to react to it. So it was a constant we're telling you to react to this. There was no actual prediction with it. And we had kind of

Speaker 2 (10:11.438)
fooled ourselves a bit to thinking we were predicting a good score. We were predicting how things were going, but instead we're just looking as a retrospect, right? It's hindsight. And I had a customer that had a green health score and they were one of my biggest customers and everything looked positive with them. And even when I spoke to the customer, everything seemed fine. And out of nowhere, we have a churn. And when I ran the postmortem on it, I decided just to be really honest about this and go,

I think we failed here. I don't think their health scoring was accurate at all. I really think we missed the mark. We should have saved this. When I went back and listened back to my conversations, I went back and looked at the interactions we had. There were a lot of signs. There were a lot of subtleties that are coming from the customer's conversations or what they weren't doing that could have made the health scoring go, hang on a second. Why are we not addressing this? What are we doing to build this?

I went try to come up with a term from it. The term I came up with was customer confidence or customer sentiment. What are we doing to track that? And the more I looked into our systems, the more I went, our systems can't predict that. But it's so vital if we actually want to do a prediction model to look into. And the only person that can predict that is the CSM. So it started looking more into how do we track this.

I love that. You've just said so many things, like so many little golden nuggets there that I'm excited about. First, you just kind of gave me a huge light bulb moment with health scores being very reactive. You're so right. I think that we build health scores thinking we're going to be proactive in the work that we end up doing. But even as I think, even the health scores I built throughout my career and for my team to actually be proactive, we're only ever reacting to either a positive or a negative health score. It's not.

any way to do forward thinking of what this is going to mean to us. And you're so, so right that a lot of it comes down to sentiment or again, customer belief of use of the product and also how they're interacting with the CSM, which is another huge part of this conversation. But let's go back to your HubSpot days when you first noticed that even

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green accounts were churning, which I think anyone listening to this episode probably feel the same. I've had plenty of green accounts churn. And I think you said something really important was that you decided to look back and actually do a post-mortem and actually look and analyze all of the data that was in front of you when it came to these green accounts that were churning. what did that look like? Walk us through, what did your post-mortem look like? What did it reveal? Share a little bit more about that.

Yeah, for sure. So when I went back to the post-mortem and really figure out what exactly was happening, I wanted to see what was coming up in the conversations we were having that pointed towards distrust in the software. Cause I always had in my head and thankfully Daphne was my manager, so I was able to have a fantastic person to ping pong these ideas with. Cause to be able to say like, surely there was an action or an inaction that lot helped them lose their confidence. And there was some moment where

They bought this with a belief of it can accomplish this. And now that was broken. wasn't necessarily what you have done as a CSN. was just that problem was still not addressed. So one of the main things that popped up was going right back before they even became a customer. Who was involved with the closing? Who were the people that were looting those conversations? And I found that there was three big influencers who not once were we seeing in our checking calls, not once were we seeing in our QBRs and

That's a whole other conversation as well. I eventually say that the QBRs, but they were not involved. We never saw them, but yet they were a major decision. The first reason to purchase it. So I actually decided to reach out to one of them and go, Hey, I know we're done, but I'd love to get your feedback. And sure enough, they didn't see the value of what we're doing in HubSpot. And they were made influencer to go, yeah, we're not going to be using the tool anymore. And all they could think was.

Well, this person was decided that we're going to purchase it. And because of our decision to not engage with them at a meaningful level, they weren't really seeing what was going on. And I found that really my point of contact was a great champion, but wasn't fantastic to be able to go internally to their own org and go, this is the value of HubSwap. This is the value of what I'm doing, what's happening right now. So for them, all they saw were problems. All they saw was something going, this is moving too slow, or this is not as efficient as we wanted to be. Therefore,

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get rid of it. At my point of contact, did not have the ability to be able to say this is why we need to keep it. And that's where we got pinpointed to that as a sign that we should have started tracking early. Surely I should have been able to come up to the health score and go log as a sentiment belief. a main influencer has not shown up for the last three check-ins. Therefore the health score should be showing that as this is a negative sentiment. This is why you should be worried about this account. And therefore create an engagement to go.

This is how you can engage with that person. Get them back into the calls and really deep into them because they're your risk.

I love that you just highlighted something so, so important that I think we take for granted in customer success, which is the lack of multithreading or the lack of really having multiple contacts within your customer organization. Because I see this often, but every customer at every company, there are multiple decision makers that are going to decide, yes, we're going to pay for this software and implement it and start using it. But there's probably even more as someone who's been part of executive teams.

there's so many people who weigh in on which tools you actually keep within a company. would say even more than when a sales cycle happened. I think there's even more people making a decision on a renewal cycle than the actual sale. you're relying on your one point of contact to tell the value of a product to, let's say the CFO, the COO and the CRO, all who are the executive owners of this product. Suddenly you're going to be like,

really shortchanging yourself because they don't see the value the same way you articulate the value and your point of contact is just going to say, yes, I use this tool every single day. Well, we all know in 2025, usage does not equal value and usage is great as a starting point. But if you don't actually show value, you might as well just count that as churn, which is probably why those green accounts were showing churn because they were

Speaker 1 (16:41.41)
great when they're coming to usage, but they weren't seeing the value. And I'm so interested that you guys were able to pull all of this out of your post-mortem. And then you said that the CSM put in that negative sentiment. Was that something that's manual or did you guys automate that? How did that start becoming a part of everything you guys were building with your health scores?

So I started to do that inside of Personia then as a leader, because that was one of the parts where I said, I want to be able to start building that out. I want to build this process. And sure enough, it is a manual process. It is something that you can't rely on automation to track. Here's what's been brought up in a call I'm having, or who the observations I'm making on who is attending a call or digging deeper into what is the sentiment of the people who are also using this tool, but are not always present with us.

That has to be manually done. And I, I know straight away there's always the piece of, but we need to invest in automation and we need to invest in freeing up time to allow this to go. And when I started talking about the renewal probabilities going and how much effort has to go into a human sitting down to go through this, the very quick pushback he goes, we don't have time. We have the resources to build that out. and I always say, well, yeah, you're right, but that's because you're looking at investing and removing time in the wrong place.

This is the time you should actually bring a human into it and invest in automating other tasks or other pieces that don't need to have that human insight. Because if you don't do it, you are going to have those churns. You are going to have those missed opportunities to grow the business as well and missed those opportunities for cross-sell because you're not investing in allowing people to essentially be Sherlock Holmes and investigate the data and investigate what they're seeing in their conversations. feel like Don can help, but I still think

you need to invest in those humans.

Speaker 1 (18:31.82)
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think in the world of AI that we continuously battle ourselves against every day, I always say it, yes, AI can be a tool, but it's not going to replace what humans are able to do, especially within the customer success space. And like you just said, in a sentiment scoring, which has to have a human interaction and able to be predictable and able to actually create some sort of renewal forecast or probability, which is really, really important.

in everything that we do in customer success. And no matter how much AI is out there, I'm sorry, predicting sentiment is gonna be a tough one to crunch out. Maybe it will be someday. Maybe a few years from now, I'm gonna be biting my own words. But for now, it's just, it's a big part of it. But I think another big crutch that's happened in customer success is health scores have become almost this like Bible for customer success leadership teams. I know personally, my first health score I built,

and even the first board report I did, I used health scores as a clear indicator of we have healthy accounts that are gonna forecast renewal and we're gonna have great upsells, all these wonderful things I did, but it wasn't always true, but I used it. I used it all the time as a future predictor for success of our customers and our accounts. And why do you think leadership teams or companies are using them as a crutch?

I think there's two things with it. Health scoring for me is what I always call like the three pillars of data when it comes to customer success. They've existed since this became a motion because it worked. The initial model of health scoring to be able to showcase this is where you should be as a CSM spending your time got us to where we are today and it was brilliant for getting there. But I think what's happened now is we just haven't challenged it and health scoring hasn't kept up with

the moving market and the way in which people do businesses. We're still stuck in a operating model that was used in 2015 when it's we've evolved. But the other part that goes with it is now that more and more businesses are being saying we need to use customer success, we need a customer success department. Therefore, we need one of these metrics and health scores it. Health scoring easy is easy. So let's just build something very quickly that we get there. Customers are healthy. Look at our health score. And that

Speaker 2 (20:50.45)
ease gives them an instant part to go look at what we're doing. And when you have so many eyes on customer success and so many eyes on businesses saying, how do we keep the lights on? There is that fight to go, let me just give you some data point to show that we're doing something well. And that's why I think there's such a reliance on it.

I I said this before and I hate saying this, I don't want to talk badly about our industry and everything we've accomplished in customer success, but I do think sometimes in CS we get lazy. And I've said it and I've said it time and time again, but sometimes it's easier for us to create checkbook, like check boxes as a playbook. And it's like, okay, we finished all these things in the playbook, done, customer is going to be successful. Or like you said,

put all this data in, get a green health score, we're gonna have healthy green customers. We almost take the easy way in some ways when it comes to CS forecasting and predictability, which I know, listen, I'm a practitioner, I'm not trying to say bad things about all the beautiful things we've built, but like you said, we tend to get stuck in operating models that were from 2015 and in 2025, that no longer applies. And I think some of the things you said were around sentiment, around like,

predictability, I think these are very important parts of a health score. And for anyone listening, they're probably thinking, okay, I need to revisit what the heck my health score is. So I'm curious in your view, what should be included in a health score that actually predicts renewal?

So I think the first thing is you kill the turn. You completely stop calling it a health score.

Speaker 1 (22:26.122)
Exit. No longer in force. Just like King D.R. No more hellscore.

Listen, if you ever want to have a bit of fun, just look when I mentioned this on LinkedIn and you'll always see some comments going, no, this is ridiculous. How can you kill this thing? Like we can. You kill the term. But the reason why you kill the term first and foremost is because if I'm speaking to GTN, if I'm speaking to product or in speaking to a board of investors and I say, this is a health score. I'm in CS, I'm in my CS bubble. I know what.

a health score should do. It should show me the likelihood of an account going to redeem. But if I just call it health score, no one knows really what I'm talking about. It can mean a million different things to different people. I've I've tested this and I've actually said to some folks who have no CS background, if I said health score and gave you a number, what do you think this means? And I got wild answers. I had some people saying the health score showcases how much they like using the product.

I've had some people say a health score is more likely this that I can upsell to somebody. A health score is more likely that someone's not going to contact our support team. Like all important things don't get me wrong, but if you go back to what we want a health score to be, it doesn't necessarily tell the full picture. So call it what it is. It's a renewal probability score. That way, everything that you showcase say this is a renewal probability scoring. Every department will look at that and go, I know what that is. I know how I can impact that.

I know how I can if you data that helps him with this and makes this more and more accurate and then CS has a seat at the table. Now you have a valid way to be able to go. This is how this protects revenue and as a shows revenue growth attached with it. And that's what we care about this.

Speaker 1 (24:07.566)
Oh my gosh, anyone who's like watching the actual video podcast right now, all I'm doing is smiling and nodding. I, there's, have no notes to add to that. That is so right. It is so right though. It's so important to call out that we are just trying to predict a renewal here. And if you change the naming, I was just smiling thinking, wow, I would have saved hours, if not weeks of my life, trying to convince other departments what they have to do to actually make the hell score green.

They don't get it. They're just like, green, yellow, red. And I remember how many health scores I've built throughout my career and everyone in marketing or finance was like, so what does yellow mean? and giving me these blank stares and I'm like, what do you mean? I put so much energy and effort into this and it's gonna make sure we have renewals and upsells. And they're like, okay. But you're so right. Even as simple as changing a name can change how our mindset actually works with this data.

how it actually helps us as a business and helps other teams, like you said, which is just the point of it really. And so I love it. Just X the name, change it.

I think my call out to that part is, so if anyone's listening to this, please don't leave a comment on my LinkedIn again. You're just creating another health score with a different name. I kind of am, but there's a reason to it.

Exactly. There's a reason to all the madness in customer success. I love that. I love it. Amazing.

Speaker 2 (25:28.462)
But the input part that once we've done that is I would say there's still don't get me wrong. There's still a need for the alert style of health scoring by saying your customer has taken an action and you should be aware of this or their average usage of the tool has dropped. Like of course, fact that are all that in for my scoring. That would be 40 % of what makes up the score. 60 % of it is the CSMs input. And that can be brought down to make sure that one, the CSM always have the

overriding majority of what dictates the score. Because I sometimes use, I use an example of I have my Weber barbecue. I adore my Weber barbecue. I will never replace my Weber barbecue. I will be loyal to Weber. This podcast is now sponsored by web, sorry.

love that. Right now this is how you're going to be here with Grand Partnership Opportunity.

but I use it for three months of the year. If you put a health score to that, there will go, he's going to get rid of it. But I adore it. This is where that usage comes in. I put the other extreme of my, actually I use say my cattle, but lately it's my television. I use my television daily. I hate my TV. I absolutely despise it. The moment it breaks, I'm getting a different brand. I'm not going with that brand afterwards. It's the same with software usage. So we can't just have that be the majority of what makes up the score.

40 % will help give you that safeguard because the 60 % of CSN given that context behind here's why the usage is low. Here's why the usage is high, but should still be a concern because of the sentiment. And starting to track things like how engaged are the multi-treading users that we need here? What conversation moments are you hearing? Are you hearing someone say, this was much easier for me to implement than I expected and I results faster? Great. Positive sentiment. The score increases.

Speaker 2 (27:17.228)
Just logging those pieces in the CRM ensures that we have a health score that showcases sentiment, showcases usage and leads me to go the likelihood of this account renewing is X. And I'm sorry, get rid of the terms green, yellow and red. Give it a number. Because to your exact point, I've gone into rooms where we had a health square model had green, yellow, orange and red. And the biggest argument we'd always have is, well, what's yellow and what's in orange?

Exactly. They're like, what's yellow? How do we get it to green? Like, I've had that question come up so many times. They're like, why is it yellow? Okay, I explain why it's yellow. And then they're like, but what is it going to take to go to green? And then there's so many levers, but it's like, again, a numeric value makes complete sense because it's like, okay, plus one minus one, whatever it is, like, just make it make sense. And I think what you're saying makes a whole bunch of sense, even though the LinkedIn trolls might disagree with us. But

I'm also curious, you mentioned 60-40, which I'm guessing everyone's already like their brains are churning thinking, what? I have to do like 60 % of human sentiment. And you just mentioned like stakeholders alignment, how often they're showing up on calls, which are really great. But how are you, are those each individual sentiments or is it just like a joint sentiment score? How are you actually listing out all the human sentiment pieces that make up that 60 % and then how does it actually affect the score?

So for my model, what I would have inside of the CRM is there are a total of nine fields. We have three fields for positive sentiment, three fields for neutral sentiment, three fields for negative sentiment. And I'm not allowing the CSMs to go and input their own fields into each drop down because then we'll have hundreds of them and it becomes impossible to report on. I really want to make sure we have something streamlined.

Yeah, keep it clean and organized.

Speaker 2 (29:02.99)
Exactly. So I have 10 options in each piece. And the CSM just picks the one that they've seen because they're kind of categorized into a catch all piece. But that's the point is for reporting. But it means that they don't have to invest a huge amount of time in going, well, was this exactly why this is a positive sentiment? So the enter and all this data? No, simple drop down. One of them could be a an extra team is now being pulled into the next training call or a request has been pulled in for this team to get exposure.

Puzzle sentiment, clearly the other teams were interested in this. It could be that now my point of contact when they joined the checking calls feels like they're going through the motions. They're not really asking me questions. They're not really challenging me on new updates. They just seem disengaged, neutral. And now there's just one of those categories that I can pick. So when I have all those, means that my CSMs can just go in very quickly, go boom, boom, score gets generated. Yeah.

I love that. I love that you have the dropdown. I love that it's only within the three spaces, like you said, keep it organized. But I was, as you were talking through all of that, I was just thinking from a CSM perspective, I was like, this can get kind of hairy and overwhelming, especially in scaled environments. Let's say I have hundreds of accounts, right? And 60 % of my renewal, what do you call it? Renewal predictability score, right? That's renewal probability, right? So as I'm going through this with hundreds of my accounts,

That's a probability.

Speaker 1 (30:25.474)
How do you scale that? Like how do you give your CSMs the motivation, but also the realization that this is gonna help? Because I can just see that being very, very overwhelming for CSMs.

Totally. I'm not going to be unrealistic here. I think it is going to be difficult to pull it off of the scale environment. And I haven't got the exact secret sauce to how you do it. So if anyone's listening and says, I have an idea, please tell me. But how I approach it myself is, again, it goes back to my earlier piece of where are we investing in the time pressure being put on the CSM? And I've been in the scale environment. In fact, I went to the customer success and host, well, that was my background. I started on the scale team.

So I know what it's like to have hundreds of accounts associated with your name and hand. They all are important. They all have their own things to go through. And how do I make sure they all get a strong customer experience? That's, that is hard. I think how you solve for it, how I'm solver is when the net focus on what are the repetitive tasks or repetitive questions that, these customers go through. And I'm not wasting a CSM's time, but putting them in front of a customer to answer those pieces. What do I do to.

automated onboarding. How do I make sure everything is within in-app so that they can be shown here's how you do X, Y and Z or here's case studies or customers who are in your field who are seeing similar results using this tool or using this kind of methodology behind what we're trying to do. Build that. And I know that takes time, but the advantage of building all of those pieces out is now that CSM doesn't have to worry about doing that over and over again. I dare say like you could, there is this

time where I like everyone was thinking webinars are the solution to a scale team. And I'm of the school of thought that webinars are a great tool for a scale team, but they're not the holy grail. Because to the point, every customer is different. Every customer does have a unique piece they want to go through and you can't solve that with a webinar. But what you can solve it through is put on investment to allow the CSM the now I have time. Now I have time to focus on these customers, but also be honest and go.

Speaker 2 (32:33.678)
Who are the customers who are going to grow into that next segment? Have them be the priority. Have them be the one that is going to get that scoring model built out from you and puts that time investment in. And that's also a great story for a CSM to tell. To be able to say, I'm investing in these customers and I've grown them into the next segment. I understood the importance of them and if I'm looking for a promotion, that's the story I want to be behind.

Okay, just a quick break from the podcast. If you've ever walked out of a quarterly business review thinking that went well, but still lost the renewal three months later, chances are the issue wasn't actually with your product, but it was with the story that you told. Most customer success professionals show data, not value. And executives, they don't renew because of dashboards. They renew because they believe the story you tell about impact.

how your product helped them grow revenue, save time, or reduce risk is the real reason why they are renewing with you. And that is exactly why I created the Value Storytelling Handbook for Customer Success. It's a practical step-by-step guide that teaches you how to turn everyday customer outcomes into powerful value stories that actually land with decision makers. You will be getting frameworks, templates, and real examples on how you can start

sharing value stories today. Now, if you wanna download this, all you have to do is go over to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash resources. Again, grab your copy at thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash resources and start communicating value like the strategic partner your execs expect you to be. Go ahead and go over to thecustomersuccesspro.com

forward slash resources, or I will link it in the show notes of this podcast. All right, back to the episode. I think it's really important to use case studies and just examples of how it can be successful. I think it's great when you're in a CSM position to do that with your customers. But as a leader, you can use great examples of how a sentiment score actually results in positive output. Like you said, whether it's a renewal or upsell or making their lives easier, because I know a lot of CSMs really feel

Speaker 1 (34:49.762)
Like even with AI, even with automations, they're just saying that it's all too much. It's way too much admin work for us to go in manually add a sentiment score to every single customer. But it does result in outcomes, like you've just said. And it is something that's much more trackable and much easier for them in the long run. So I think the pain point I keep seeing is that people think that a health score is actually going to create a new ability for them to suddenly magically

upsell or renew a customer, but it's really just causing more work for them. But it seems like the sentiment score is actually helping them and the probability score is actually helping them, which again, just highlighting that as a leader can probably help ease that mental burden that CSMs are going through. But I'm also thinking that people listening are thinking, well, that much human part makes it very, very susceptible to interpretation.

And how are you making sure or training your CSMs to really understand which of those 10 pieces they should be increasing or decreasing? Because that can be very, very, again, one CSM could be saying something really high and the other could be saying something low. And that maybe is jarring the score a bit. So I'm wondering how do you kind of normalize what sentiment looks like from one CSM to the next?

And here's what I'd say. I really think we just need to trust our CSMs. And I see this a lot where folks say like, I wouldn't have given that this score. I would have given it X. I would have done AB &C. And that was my mistake when I became a manager. I actually spent a lot of time turning around to my CSMs and going, I wouldn't have done that. I would have given them this because of my input on AB &C. And it was only when I had one CSM just kind of snap at me and say, you know, I talk to my customers more than you do. I get

they're telling me to just, you're not seeing it. And that's why I'm giving them this score. And that was the light bulb on what I go, you're right. So when we have the power of it's open to interpretation, it 100 % is and that's okay. Trust our CSMs trust them to have it. And when they're trying to figure out what's the scoring, I should give it, then I'll coach them through it. Then I'll say, well, here's what this meets or here's what I've encountered. Here's what I've seen, but I will always end that conversation to go, but I am not going to tell you what scored even. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:10.542)
You do it. I trust you.

I love that. I always say that to my new hires as well. I'm like, I have hired you because you are the right person for this job and I trust that you're going to do that to the best of your ability. And I think, like you said, it's trust thing. Like you're being hired because I believe you can do this job. And part of doing this job is be able to assess your customers and assess the room and assess and understand how a call went or how a customer is actually using versus not using our product. And so I love those. It's great, great, great tip.

Yeah, I get feedback from time to time myself on that. I'm a very tough interviewer. And if people who join my team are like, I had no idea if I was going to get the job. You were so hard to read. I go, that's why I want to trust you. And would you join the company? Like I went through a tough interview process so I can trust you. That's fine.

Yeah, it's so true. So everyone I work with or coach with or even have hired in the past, I always say like an interview with a hiring manager that's in a CS role, all I'm doing is assessing how good you're going to be in front of my executives that are my customers. That's all I'm doing in that entire assessment. You can rattle out all your important metrics, which I will have read in your CV, but you can rattle all those out. But I am looking at the ability for you to actually hold a conversation with an executive leader or a customer and

That is what I guess an interview should be in customer success, at least that's how I feel of it. yeah. Listen, I want to talk about another metric that has made health scores what they are today and what they have been, let's say, in 2015, which is the dreaded NPS score. And I don't believe in it, but I know that there's probably a lot of companies, A, still using it, fine, but they're using it as a big part of their health scoring.

Speaker 1 (38:55.596)
I would love to know in your own opinion, like, are you using NPS today? Is it any part of your health scoring? Like, what are you using NPS or let's just say customer surveys as part of the sentiment or not part at all?

I groan what I hear that a company is using MPS as like a measurement of success of a CSM or they say that's one of my key metrics. No, again, MPS is one of the three pillars MPS, QBRs and health scoring that got us to where we are today. And God bless it. It was great when it started. It was a great initiative for us. It should evolve. is MPS is for me are a moment in time and I can't judge an entire 12 months by a moment in time.

I've seen so many times where we would have a customer get a poor MPS score. The CSM would call them or email them like two or three days later and go, Hey, I saw this score. You gave it two. Is everything okay? Sorry. I was having a really bad day. I took it out on your support team or I actually got what I needed. realized it was A, B and C. I'm good. Don't worry about it. Or on the flip side, I have a customer who gives a 10 and everything's just amazing, but they have no say in if we renew or not.

So, yeah, MPSs are create a false narrative and they are just pure performative metrics.

They make us feel really good. They make us feel, I call them vanity metrics, like inter-vanity metrics.

Speaker 2 (40:25.902)
Totally. And I think there's too much pressure being put on CSMs when suddenly we see someone have a poor MPS. And I've seen it when I was a CSM. I've seen it to my own teams where a senior leader will suddenly come in and go, why did that customer give a seven out of 10? You need to prioritize what's happening here. Like it's a moment in time. I have no context fully behind it. We need to figure that out. So if your sole obsession is returning that score around, you're missing the point of what the score could be. For me, the score should evolve into a

Again, an overall sentiment score. And how I view it happening within a CSM is once the MPS comes in and again, to be really clear, I'm not saying get rid of MPS, but use them as a launchpad. So once that survey is filled in, CSM gets in touch. They have a call with the customer. They go through whatever gave that positive or negative sentiment and they wrap the call by going out of curiosity, if we were getting that MPS score now, what would you score us? Log that. And then after every

interaction, every point. You don't have to have it be as robotic as saying, hey, as we wrap this call up, you've grade between one and 10. The CSM can just ask those questions. They try to the sentiment. Now that we're going through this, you know, how are you feeling? Are you feeling really confident? Where our solution? Do you think this is getting towards your goal? Yeah, I feel super confident. Great. Nine out of 10. CSM is tracking it themselves. And then over six, seven, eight months, I take a step back and I look in the CRM. I have this wonderful graph then.

that shows the overall curve of that sentiment. I'm able to start tracking while I can see that the sentiment is going up and to the right. I can see now the sentiment is actually starting to drop down and that feeds into that renewal probability score because I'm able to see the overall story that's been told. Or as I got to learn with my time in Tive where seasonality can really impact your customers, we would see some where their MPS score would be so low, but it's because they just weren't doing anything.

because of seasonality with the business, but they were still going to renew it. It's just the way it worked. but that's my

Speaker 1 (42:27.15)
I love that. I love that you were able to like take scores and then also ask hard questions. I think that's something else we're not doing enough of in customer success. We're almost avoidant of some of the tougher questions. And it's not like you're asking a super hard question, but it's like, hey, you gave us a great or a bad score. Is that the same today based on the interactions or the value you're seeing in our product or service? And I think sometimes just asking that question unlocks so much more.

than you could ever imagine from a moment in time and a score in a pop-up in your app or whatever it is. But I think another thing you pointed out, which I love, is that you're looking at over time, like data over time. It's not just a once, it's like change over time. It's like, okay, well, you went from a seven to a 10 and then down to a six. Like what happened there? What's the average? What's your median score? It's a lot of math, a lot of statistics, which I was horrible at. But still, it's really important to make sure you're not just marking

your health score and your customer sentiment based in one moment in time, which I think we get guilty of. I know I had done it before. So I'm so happy that you've been able to figure out a way to really evolve that. But as we are speaking about being guilty of things, I'm just thinking when you were building your customer success health score or probability score, whatever we're calling it, probability score now, that's the name, what

Like, what did you do that if you're looking back, what's like one mistake you've made or something that you would warn others not to do when they're building their probability scoring?

I rushed it. And this is why I'm so adamant about when we're talking about building out scoring where I think you need to take your time. It is going to be hard. The temptation is there because again, right to the start of this conversation, CS orgs are under pressure to show how to perform it. They're under pressure to show how they are a revenue driver for our business. So it can be very quick to go there. got this built, go use it.

Speaker 2 (44:28.694)
we really need take our time with it because it is so powerful when it's done right. And I rushed it and it caused me to miss some obvious signals that I should have been putting into the system. But it also meant I wasn't given my team the coaching time to really get the grips with it. Instead, I was presenting this thing to leaders and going, and now it's live, we're going. And then my team wouldn't be pulling it in accurately or filling into its full potential. And the pressure resolved me to go.

You said this is going to really help us predict renewals. Why are we still getting churns coming in at the bare minimum amount of notice period? Why did this pop up? So I'd say, I wish I took my time. I know that I had taken my time. We've an incredibly accurate model where there's very rarely we get a churn that suddenly pops up with the bare minimum notice. We're able to go, this is risky. work calling it out as risky. And one thing I'd say with that as well, the other kind of

message I would have with it is what you were saying about asking the higher questions. think sometimes we're afraid of asking it. And I've seen that so many times in my own team where they go, I don't want to know the answer.

We're scared of knowing what's out there, yeah.

But we're scared because we already know what the answer is. We know it's unhealthy. We know it's going to churn. We know there's a problem there. We just don't want to hear it because the moment we hear it, we kind of take it as the moment now I've done something wrong, which is a mindset CS needs to get out of. We need to be able to ask the hard question. So instead of us going, this happened that I wish I hadn't known about it six months ago, instead going, I asked the hard question and I knew about it six months ago because I asked the hard question and I saved the account.

Speaker 1 (46:07.916)
Yeah. Let's ask more hard questions. Let's stop being avoidant of that. Let's also just realize that we probably already know the answer to the hard question, so we might as well just ask it. So I love that. So other than taking your time, which I agree, by the way, sometimes you like to rush everything in CS. I don't know if it's like the pressure of living up to quarters and years of business and the go-to market team. But if your customers are renewing on a yearly basis, why are we rushing everything we're building if it takes a year for a customer to actually renew with you? I don't know why, but.

Other than time and other than rushing it, if you were advising a CS leader starting from scratch today and building out a probability score for renewals, what would be your top piece of advice for building a model that actually works?

Speak to the customer is the other part of this as well. I've seen this a few times where Sam, gosh, I forget the gentleman's name. So I'm apologizing if he hears this, but there's someone who's left a few comments on my own LinkedIn who always comes back to say, what about the customer? When we're building all this, how do we make sure the customer is at the heart of everything we do? And Housebot had this wonderful decision tree that

I don't think we speak about enough when you hear about the culture code and HubSpot, you think about how they're with customer success. They run by a value prop of for everything we do. The very first question is what is the value to the customer? And if we're not answering value to the customer, if we don't actually bring the customer in. So as we're building out a scoring model, as we were saying to our customers, this is something we want to do, but ask them. There's no problem with turn around to a customer saying we're building a new metric that's going to help you in the long run.

We'd love to get your input on it. We'd love to see this resonate. Would you view this as something that is helpful to help you be successful? Let's do it. I think CS gets afraid of that. CS sometimes can be afraid to go, we don't want to show our customers our metrics because we're afraid we'll be seen as sales. What's we're selling every day. We're selling value. We are. So that's

Speaker 1 (48:04.398)
that we're not competent enough and our customers will think of us as less because we don't know what to share or how to show the value. But we're all human. We're all human. not in sales. In some ways, we are selling value. But still, let's stop being fearful of some of the basics of what customer success is.

And if we're forgetting to put the customer at it, then then we're failing. Yeah. It's customer success.

It's in the name. It's in the name and it's so important. think anyone listening, if you're ever questioning how to build this, what to do, whether it's health scoring, predictability scoring, whether it's renewals, upsells, any onboarding, I don't care. It comes back to the customer and asking the customer. So I think that's solid advice. Thank you so much, Sean. We keep talking about this for years probably, but I want to wrap us up and I want to go into the quick fire questions where I challenge each one of my guests every week to

basically answer these next few questions in a sentence or less. Are you ready for the challenge? Awesome. Okay. My first question for you is if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?

Let's do

Speaker 2 (49:11.822)
Customer success will focus on lifetime value.

Love it, love it. It's been an important metric for years now, but I love it. I love it. Value, value, value. It's the name of the game. Amazing. Next question is, which app or software do you use every day or every week? And it can be on your phone or your laptop. It can be CS related or not and why.

So I use Fabicon daily, which it's completely different in the conversation I have, but Fabicon helps me make sure that I'm keeping my LinkedIn content in check with my audience that it's actually resonating with.

Ooh, this is fun. I have to go check this out. I've never heard of this tool, but that's interesting. Amazing. Next question is, if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be?

Stop being a dumping ground for everything. That's a catch all, it's the truth. I say I must be more focused.

Speaker 1 (50:05.07)
It is, it is. We sometimes just become the everything department, which is unfortunate, but it is what it is. I love that. Amazing. Okay. Another question, which is going to be new, and I'm going to try it out for the first time with you, but since we're in the world of AI, I'd love to know what is one way that you're using AI in a cool or new way? Can be in CS or tech or personally?

I use AI to help coordinate my Disney trips. So I have a spreadsheet I have set up that pulls in so much data on queue times, holidays for my kids, my own work schedule, what the price of airline flights, hotels, everything is. And I use AI to help go, this is when the most best time for you to visit Disney to be cost effective, but also have low queue times and your kids won't be impacted by school holidays. And also for you, you don't use as much PTO.

I love that. my God, way to use like AI bot Disney version, but it's also your personal assistant. I love that. I love that. Amazing. Last question that I always ask my guests is who should be my next podcast guest?

Emma Lampert based in the UK. If anyone doesn't follow her, advice on LinkedIn is excellent. But I would say she's not a dry guest. is hilarious and is not afraid to call things out as they are. So I think we'll be entertaining for everyone here.

I love that. Emma, if you're listening to this podcast, reach out. I'd love to have you on this show. And thank you so much, Sean, again, for your energy, your advice, your insights into the whole world of health scoring and what it means. If any of my listeners have any other questions or want to follow you or chase up the conversation, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Speaker 2 (51:51.246)
Pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. So just search for Sean Reed, I'll pop up. Reach out to me, I'm always happy to have a coffee chat, always happy to just shoot the breeze on anything to do with CS or as we've uncovered, if anyone wants to talk about Disney, I could probably talk about that for three times as long as that can, because it's for success.

Yes, I love that. I feel like I'm gonna hit up Sean for all the Disney tips now, but thank you so much, Sean. I really appreciate it, and it's been an amazing conversation.

Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show. And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify,

YouTube or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. And hey, if this episode helped you share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.