How Privy doubled down on a cross functional CS team, and what this means for retention.

Erica Ayotte

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VP of Customer Success

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Privy
EP
104
Erica Ayotte
Erica Ayotte

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Erica Ayotte, VP of Customer Success at Privy.

In this episode, we talked about the importance of having deep expertise in a Customer Success team and how every CS manager at Privy has their very own unique superpower. Erica also explains how Privy successfully manages to provide a high-touch model feel to their customers at scale.

Erica also shares the tactics she uses to grab her customer’s attention when sharing helpful advice, how Customer Success, Product, and Marketing collaborate and share responsibility around customer communication at Privy, to avoid bombarding customers. 


Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

How Erica’s previous role in marketing helped her new role in customer success. 00:02:09
The value of Deep expertise in a CS team. 00:04:26
Every CSM at Privy has their own unique superpower. 00:05:23
How Privy’s CS team segment their high volume customers to provide a tailored CS model. 00:06:28
How Privy provides a high touch feel model at volume and at scale. 00:13:19
What Privy and Hootsuite have in common when it comes to churn and retention and what is completely different between the two. 00:20:04
Erica’s tactics to get her customer’s attention. 00:21:27
How Customer Success, Product, and Marketing collaborate and share responsibility at Privy. 00:23:01
How to avoid bombarding your customers with messages. 00:24:43
What Erica would do to help a company turn its churn rate around in 90 days. 00:26:27
The one thing Erica wished they knew about churn and retention when she first started out in her career. 00:28:30

Transcription

Andrew Michael: hey, Erica, welcome to the show.

Erica Ayotte: [00:01:33] Hello. Nice to be here.

Andrew Michael: [00:01:34] It's great to have you for the listeners. Erica is the VP of customer success at Privy Privu provides website conversion, market, email marketing, and messaging tools for small brands to sell more online.

They have over 500,000 businesses from 180 plus countries and have generated more than $3.9 billion in sales with privy. Prior to privy, Erica was the director of customer success strategy at Curata a customer success executive at Hootsuite and a [00:02:00] senior social media marketing manager, constant contact.

So my first question for you, Ericais how has your background in marketing helped with your role in customer success?

Erica Ayotte: [00:02:10] Oh, my goodness. I think it's helped immensely. And that's because I have my roles in customer success have been at marketing MarTech oriented or e-commerce oriented companies.

And that's actually how I. Got the job that hits me is that I was a customer. I was able to, use the tool very well and explain to others how to be successful from both a strategic and a technical perspective. I had been one of their very first enterprise customers. And after doing that for a number of years, they asked me to, Hey, do you want to come on over and help us?

Help us sell this or, be on our, on the the CS side. It was really my gateway into CS. And that's something that, has that philosophy of domain expertise is something that I feel really strongly about when hiring CSMs for my team or other [00:03:00] roles in the CS organization.

Andrew Michael: [00:03:02] Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is a common theme I've noticed on the show as well, specifically from those breaking out from other sectors and moving into customer success. Typically there were a previous client of the product that they joined. They had really strong domain expertise for the product and service, and it was a natural and easy move for them then to get into sort of.

Helping customers be successful, their product or service when they themselves had already been successful with the product or service. Yeah.

I think it just makes us so much less formulaic. Cause I think we've all, a lot of people have had that experience when your your account manager, your CSM is working with you and you can tell that the strategic recommendations that they're giving you, or like the three bullet points that they had on there.

They're listen, it's not necessarily coming from that place. Deep expertise. So I think it just feels a lot more real to the customer and they can, there's a deeper sense of empathy. If they can say, Hey, I've been in your shoes or I've been some, or at least even if they haven't done that exact thing, it's [00:04:00] something that is at least adjacent and they can more easily apply their knowledge and background to the goals and the challenges that the customer's having.

And also empathize, as well at the end of the day, understand those challenges a lot better, the pain points. So you mentioned like this is something you take seriously as well. Like when you're looking to hire to bring people on the team, what does that look like for you? Let's just say, for example, now privy, you're hiring, you're trying to bring new CSM.

What are some of the expectations you expect a new CSMs to have joining the team?

Erica Ayotte: [00:04:30] Yeah. Yeah. I will start out off by saying that I do think it is important to have an open mind. I'm not super rigid about you have to have, you must have these three characteristics because I think you can come to the table with any collection of applicable skills and be successful.

But we've had a lot of folks on the team who have been hands-on marketers before we've had. A number of people on the team who actually have run their own e-commerce businesses, which is extremely valuable experience. That's a direct [00:05:00] experience that's related to our customers. Having a background in the ecosystem of tools and how marketing and e-commerce tools work is very helpful.

One person on my team has a strong background in advertising, which might seem like, Oh, that's a little bit further afield, but it's not. Because again, they understand the ecosystem, they understand how. For example, like user identity works. And in one of the main challenges that a lot of our customers have is driving traffic to their site.

And so they have that, that wider background and having that variety of experiences on the team where they're just not all cookie cutter, actually I call it, everyone has their own super power on the team and we can learn from each other. And that just makes it's all stronger when we go home.

Andrew Michael: [00:05:44] Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's cause it's one of those interesting things. The customer success role, because in a lot of ways, it's still a very early industry. It's still industry. It's still very like a new role when relative new way and other defined roles like marketing have [00:06:00] been around for decades. And still like people, at the end of they also trying to figure out what works for them, what doesn't.

So I can, obviously, it also would depend quite a bit on the top of model that you bring into with your CSS at high touch, low touch, like how you're interacting with your customers. And I know we discussed before the shows well that you have a very low touch had travelers having tried to serve 500,000 businesses but managed to get good scale, what are some of the skills you're looking for when bringing team members in dealing with this type of volume of customers and how are the team then expected to serve and work with over 500,000 business?

Erica Ayotte: [00:06:34] Yeah. Yeah. So I would say, first of all, with with a large volume business like ours, it's not a monolithic model.

So we do have different types of models. Some of them are lower touch than others. And so the very first thing that we had to. Do was really segment our customer base and figure out what service offering was appropriate different levels or different tiers of customers. We do have some customers where I would describe it.

It [00:07:00] is more of a high touch model. Is it, does it look like a large enterprise engagement? Absolutely not. Cause we're still working with SMB, at the end of the day they still will get, their one-on-one onboarding. They get regular. Perhaps monthly calls all the way down the spectrum to just response of support.

And we do have a a middle tier where folks will get one-to-one onboarding but not necessarily have a sustained, one-on-one relationship over time. And so just figuring out that was a big part of the early days of figuring out what CS looked like at privy was figuring out what those tiers were, what the best.

Service offering was that was going to that, that made sense for us financially, but also provided the mass value to the customer. And that can continue to change around the edges over time in terms of defining what that is. And I think, yeah. Oh,

Andrew Michael: [00:07:51] sorry. I just want to jump in quickly.

And I was feel like what were some of those criteria that you set to set the levels? I think cause starting out. So it can be a little bit [00:08:00] daunting. Like how do you get the segments in place? How do you ensure that you distributing the rock resources to make sure you're measuring the ROI at the end of it?

What did that look like? What were they?

Erica Ayotte: [00:08:10] Yeah so in terms of where we started, I knew the very first thing that we had to do was to get an excellent support team in place. I just get responsive down, responsive. And then also self-serve resources. Because our customer base was so large.

So those were, that was step one and closely step two. Exactly. Exactly. And then once we got that in place, then we could figure out that tiering. And to start off to, to answer your question directly, it was, it was Not super elegant. It would basically was like, if you're paying, if you're paying us more money than we'll give you more time, essentially.

Which is, I think how a lot of customer success teams start off, especially when it's early days, you do everything you can hang on to those the those larger clients I do think it's pretty common to, in some senses over-serve your early large customer [00:09:00] base.

But so really that criteria was MRR or ARR, depending on, what level of contracts they have. That was number one, number two, I think, as we started to look at it, there were a few other factors which allowed us to understand what was the best fit customer for us.

And that's the beauty of working at a volume business, is that in a sense, we get to choose our customers for the different tiers, right? Like we're not taking on those 500,000. So another indicator for us is did they come in, did they become a customer through a self-serve motion or did they become a customer through a sales?

Motion through a sales person. And we've found that folks the customers who join pervy and they've already had a sales conversation or two are much better positioned because. First of all, they already have a much stronger background and what pre-vis is, why they're here, why they bought all that sort of stuff.

And so we could get going on delivering value for them [00:10:00] almost immediately. That doesn't mean that's impossible for folks who come in through another sort of sales motion, but it's a lot harder. And sometimes what can end up happening is that you're actually playing that sales function instead of playing the CS function.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's that. And then in some cases we, there may be folks, maybe customers who came in through self-serve, but they're showing some really great body language in terms of they're using the product really well or showing the beginnings of using the product really well. And they're very active.

And so that's, they're seeing some success. So that's when yeah. We might say, Oh, you know what? They're getting like a good amount of success on their own. We know we could make them exponentially more successful if we engage them proactively. So there are a number of indicators there too, that we would use to reach out to those types of customers.

Andrew Michael: [00:10:49] Interesting so just to recap that as well from my understanding as well, now you started out in the beginning, it was really just putting out the fires setting up support, getting some of the automated channels in place to support that [00:11:00] next religious rudimentary looking at how much.

Customers were paying you. And that was what is how you bucketed your initial customers. You then led that on top again, like with some learnings as well, seeing that people that are going through your sales motion that had that human touch, that had already been prepped for what they were coming into were really good indicators that you'll be able to spend time and add value to them.

And then lastly, looking at different signals and usage patterns within the product to see, okay, how are they doing an engagement on their own that can signal that we can potentially be helping them. As you mentioned as well, like bringing some exponential value as well on top of that. Really interesting progression. I think it's just like a natural progression as well of from what I've heard as well in typical other companies that really it's always in the beginning, putting those fires out, getting things automated. Have you got any plans to improve upon it now in the future?

Are there any ways you're thinking about proving their segmentation.

Erica Ayotte: [00:11:51] Yeah. That's something that I feel like we were view every six to nine months, being in a scaling, growing business, sometimes, your needs can [00:12:00] certainly change over time. And so some of the things that we're thinking about is how do we typically, what we've done is figured out how to provide.

More if it's not, one-to-one at least one to many value further down our customer tier. So how do we do more at the lower end of our price point? One of the things we're trying to figure out now is that there, because there's, if you look at our data, there's a, as you might guess, there's a huge difference in retention.

And net growth between customers who go through a human touch cycle, which could mean, my team and the sales team, or either, or and spoke to who don't. And so we're trying to figure out now, how do we. Stretch that even further, what would a program look like? For folks even further down the scale?

Andrew Michael: [00:12:52] Yeah. I could almost guess like a, your attention curve probably looks the biggest drop first 90 days, and then you start to see a [00:13:00] decent plateau typically like in SMB businesses. Like the biggest hurt is in those first, a couple of months, two, three months. Yeah. Might be different for you, but I'm pretty sure it's the same.

And then I think as well, liquid would be interesting that you mentioned as well as like, how do you scale that glow, like a higher touch feel, but at volume and at scale, and you mentioned before the show is all that this is something that you think. You've done particularly well at privy. Maybe want to elaborate and like, how are you doing that?

How are you effectively delivering the sort of service and stretching that customer success field to a wider and large audience?

Erica Ayotte: [00:13:38] Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, I think it has to do with how the company thinks about customer success and how much value that we place on it. And I was just mentioning, you can see it in the data, how much more valuable those customers are to us.

Who work with our team. And so it's pretty easy to make the financial, I don't wanna say easy. It's easier to make the financial case to [00:14:00] utilize those resources within the company to, to drive down that tier. Now what we do well from a more of a tactical perspective is number one week.

Higher. We were talking about that earlier. What does the profile of person look like? And it's, you're obviously not just the profile person, but how they jive with the team, the expectations, all that sort of stuff. And so that's one of the most difficult things to get. And we have done that.

Really as a team. The other thing I would say to go along with that is that we've done really well with employee retention, right? The folks on my team kind of stick around for a long time which is really helpful for, the longer you're around, the more you know, about the product, the better, the customers, et cetera.

So the more you can teach to the rest of the team. So that's one thing then the other thing that we do is we focus on the folks that we're working with are SMBs and basically they just don't have time for fluff. So we get right into value immediately. These are the three things that are going to help you.

And we're working with the eCommerce [00:15:00] businesses make more money. Yep. That's right. We're going to help you make more money if you do this and they do one, two, three, and they're like, Oh, I'm making more money and we're like, great, okay, now here's four or five, six. So it's helpful in that. Our products are directly related to their sales.

And so we can, we have an outsize impact on helping those businesses. If we can help with their say like conversion rates or open rates or anything like that from say like an email marketing perspective or a lead capture perspective, if you percentage points here and there is a lot of dollars. To them at the end of the day.

Yeah. Impact is huge. And keeping focus on that impact and be prescriptive.

Andrew Michael: [00:15:42] I think that's an amazing position to be in as a customer success manager. It's not always the case. I think where your product or service can directly be tied back and measured to the value that it delivers. And like at the end of this day, like they're coming to you to drive more sales.

Like you can literally [00:16:00] prove and show. The sales coming from your tool or service, like a lot of times products or service might be a little bit indirect. And a lot of times I think they could do work on their pricing strategy because ultimately you really want to be trying to keep it closely aligned with your pricing and packaging.

But it's a beautiful thing when you can actually do that. This actually was something we chatted about with Heidi Gibson, from GoDaddy on the show and that a really interesting story where they were working on a website builder. And one of the things that we're trying to figure out, what was the metrics for success?

What did they're going to be looking at as the input metric there was going to drive retention? And the interesting thing they realized as well was that people, they just came to the realization that people come to them to build a website, but it's not to build a website it's to drive more sales it's to get more bookings it's to sell more tickets, whatever that services vehicle.

Yes. And there we're fortunate in the position that there had those metrics at hand. So if there was an e-commerce or they could see the sales that were going through, if it was a hairdressing salon, they could see the bookings being made. And then they started [00:17:00] working backwards and said, okay, like the most successful websites on our site and most sales that they're doing have.

Social channels connected. That was one indicator. So first thing they did was start driving people to sessions, but really interesting, like when you are able to articulate and measure the actual value, delivering your customer, then it makes it so much easier to develop the strategies that you're going to work on and help them.

You mentioned a couple of things do you have playbooks in place, like with your CSMs, like when they're going to quote customers.

Erica Ayotte: [00:17:27] Yes. Yes. And so we basically have a, I would call it a flexible playbook, because the needs of every customer, of course, a little bit different.

However, a lot of most e-commerce customers have a couple of things in common. And so there are, some foundational work that we suggest and emphasize to, to our customers. It's really a journey, right? Like it's like at the beautiful basics. Once we get that in place, then it's like, all right, what else do you want to do on top of that?

Cause like we focus on the most high impact things and that's Probably between two and four different types [00:18:00] of campaigns, both on-site campaigns and email marketing campaigns. And so we focus on those high value things and sometimes the customer, it depends who you get within an organization.

Sometimes they're very brand oriented for example, and they want to take a lot of time with their email design and they want to get into that. And for us Excuse me. One of our watch words is, get it live on the call. We know that if we can get it live on the call, get them going.

They're going to start seeing those sales roll in and they're going to start believing right away and we'll get credited credibility immediately. When it comes to those CS relationships, and this is the managed accounts. You have the one-on-one over time for the lifetime of their relationship with us.

That's when we have the time and ability to get into some of the more granular strategies. For example, so we'll build on the foundation that we've already created and we are really good. I would say, especially as our team started to scale and we had to become really [00:19:00] good at internal documentation because otherwise it just becomes.

Crazy massive nightmare. Yeah, exactly. And so all of this, as we learned as an organization, we were really good about documenting these things from an internal perspective. So whenever a customer has a use case that would match one of these. Strategies or specific campaigns where like, all right, we can pull that right up and let's get that, in front of you.

And we use a lot of those as, learnings back to the rest of the organization as well, especially the sales team, if they're in a sales conversation and someone has a question related to this use case, they're like, Oh yeah, like I know I heard the CS team talk about this. There's an example.

Let's pull it right up.

Andrew Michael: [00:19:40] That's very cool. So you start to use like some of those use cases and put them into other areas of the product sector. And I'm showing assume is almost, I'm sure that product changes have happened as a result of these as well. And you pushed them into products too. Yeah.

Erica Ayotte: [00:19:56] Yes.

Yes. So we have a very close relationship with our [00:20:00] product team.

Andrew Michael: [00:20:01] Very cool. So I was interested as well then, like we mentioned, I think who tweets a little bit earlier there was a you're coming from hoot suites. I think. In my mind, they're fairly similar target audiences like SMBs typically use the products like I'm interested between your experience now at privy and your experience to treat suites two questions, like one, what is one thing that you've found that both businesses had in common when it came to churn and retention and what is one thing that's completely different between the two.

Erica Ayotte: [00:20:32] Yeah. So I think the one thing that completely different between the two is that very close alignment to sales. And I, and you were mentioning that's. Relatively rare when you can work on a product like that. That's so directly tied to a business's bottom line. And not that the work I could see it, wasn't tied to that.

There were certainly, you could definitely measure that. It was just a little bit, maybe one more step removed. In terms of the similarities. And I will [00:21:00] just preface this by saying I did work on a different segment at HootSweet, but I think in general, if you think of their large customer base, which is mostly SMBs, it's always time, right when you're in SMB.

When you are a small business owner or an entrepreneur time is always. That's a huge limitation. And so getting folks or getting your customers to believe that this is the thing that they need to work on them, and they have a hundred things to work on that day. I think is the biggest challenge there.

So it's I guess I would say it's about trusted in, in making sure that you have their attention and getting them to believe in what you're. What your,

Andrew Michael: [00:21:38] what are some of your tricks and cause I totally agree with you on that. Like focus is the key. And specifically when you've got a ton of other things like setting up privy or HootSweet is probably not top of your list.

Like what are some of the tactics that you've worked on with your teams to try and drive that attention to your audience and get them away?

Erica Ayotte: [00:21:58] Yeah. You have two ears and one mouth [00:22:00] for a reason. And so being able to listen and understand truly understand what your customer values and not just everyone, and privy, everyone wants to sell more.

They want to grow their sales. We know that. But what does that, what are the things around that, that the customer values do they, are they one of those folks who love the design? Piece and that's really important to them. So then we can focus more on that. Are they someone who just wants a list of things to do when like check off the boxes?

Great. Are they someone who just wants it so dead simple and don't complicate it and just, tell me what to do in under being able to listen and understand not just what they're trying to do, but what that person values can help build that trust. And again, going back to the domain expertise and having.

Folks who are having these conversations, who can directly relate and use that expertise to guide them. That helps to build that trust too.

Andrew Michael: [00:22:55] Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested then as well, like going back [00:23:00] to your experience in marketing and now at customer success, serving scale, like in my mind as well, when it comes to the low touch model, trying to scale customer success, a lot of it as well has quite strong overlaps with things, our customer life cycle marketing, and yes.

How is that function at privy served as its deluxe? Does it sit in customer success now due to the nature of the business? Is it crossover between collaboration, between marketing and success? Like how are you reaching these large audiences and making impact?

Erica Ayotte: [00:23:33] Yeah, that's a great question. So the it's a shared responsibility between CS product and marketing, and it depends on the audience that we are reaching out to if it's, if the audiences that entirely, that self-serve audience and our product team is really concentrating on those folks from a, to your point, like a lifestyle life cycle marketing perspective, whether that's.

Utilizing in product messaging or [00:24:00] whether that's using marketing automation or whatever that may be over on the CS side, we we really manage those audiences that we're accountable for. And so we'll set up. In product messaging, we'll set up some marketing automation, in, in concert with our partners in those other organizations.

We also utilize We have two types of marketing automation that we use. One that's more, individual to the, to the individual CSM. So they'll have, they can set up their own personal flows. That'll more likely to end up in the primary inbox. And then we have some other more traditional marketing automation flows that we're sending out through our marketing systems that are just targeted to those.

To those audiences. So yeah, so it's a shared responsibility and it just really depends on the the targeted audience.

Andrew Michael: [00:24:47] And I'm sure in the beginning that process took a while to get drawn to and figure it out and probably still is not perfect itself, but it never is. What are some of the things that you'd recommend [00:25:00] to teams like trying to get something in place where they can have this cross team collaboration, one to ensure that they're not just overly bombarding customers with messages and knowing them, but then to also having an effective strategy where the customer is getting the best experience and you're able to maximize like the ROI and the time of the team.

Erica Ayotte: [00:25:18] Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So what worked really well for us is having those really And definitive boundaries. Right around audience. So if you're owning an audience, then that makes it really clear. And I think that is what prevents the bombarding of too many messages is if you have that clear delineation between the different teams and who they're talking to, first of all so I think that's really important.

And then trusting each other, right? Because the folks on the marketing side, it's been a long time since I've been a marketer. So those, we know those tools change all the time and. Quite frankly, I've forgotten how to use some of them in detail. And so had to certainly ask our friends over in in, in [00:26:00] those roles to help us optimize.

And they had some great suggestions around segmentation and messaging and that sort of stuff. And then, by the same. By the same token, I think like us helping them out with segmentation of certain audiences and what to look for to create in that segmentation, what sort of product behaviors, that sort of stuff.

So the learnings really go both ways. So having trust to take each other's advice, but then also having clear parameters in terms of who owns what I think.

Andrew Michael: [00:26:27] Yeah. Yeah, that sounds I think definitely having the parameters in terms of the customer segments and base makes things clearer.

And it's something that you can pretty easily with some good segmentation to begin with set up and have the boundaries which is quite cool. I see. We're running up on time. So I want to save for two questions. I'll ask every guest. First question is, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now, right?

You join a new company, you arrive general attention is not doing good at all. The CEO comes to you and says, Hey, Erica we really need to turn things around. We need you to help. We have 90 days to make a [00:27:00] dense in the number. What did you do with your time? How would you improve a retention for the County?


Erica Ayotte: [00:27:05] Yeah. So I think the first thing to do is get as much customer feedback as possible in multiple channels. Listening to customer calls deriving, there's a lot of great call recording tools. Now driving data from that, what are the most, our competitors being mentioned what are the churn reasons, the churn notes listening to sales.

And so once you learn what the customer is saying, then I think going and listening to sales, didn't understanding is what they're selling, what the customer thinks they're buying and understanding that. And then basically trying to understand if both sides of the house are speaking the same language or if the, sometimes it can happen where the.

The company thinks that they have built a value around this one thing, but the customer is actually saying, it's this really adjacent thing is the thing that's valuable to me. And so making sure that the company is really aligned, they're delivering what the [00:28:00] customer wants in a way with the customer values.

And it's amazing to me how often I've seen Companies and their customers sorta like talk past each other on that. And so I think it's just, that's usually an alignment issue.

Andrew Michael: [00:28:13] I think. Absolutely. We actually had Steli Ft on the show from clothes.com. And this is one of the topics we tended about in detail in terms of the misalignments for sales.

And a lot of times it comes down to a couple of things. Like one is just bad incentives. So not really having good incentives alive and around retention and just keeping them around the sales. Sales. Aren't really bothered about what deals they're closed and what they're not. That's a whole other show.

I love the one. And the other one is in sexually, you mentioned, which is interesting is that sales teams might not have the confidence they need to actually say to customers, Hey, you might not be a good fit for us or turning down their own deals or having the ability to do so as well. So I definitely asked you, that's another area where you definitely get a lot of friction and problems coming through.

[00:29:00] Nice. So next question I have for you then is let's what's one thing that, you know, today about general intention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career.

Erica Ayotte: [00:29:10] Oh my goodness. One thing I wish. Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that I wish that I knew earlier is that it's not It's to not hyper-focus on the larger accounts.

I think there's always a lot of anxiety around. Oh my gosh, this one we have to, because you end up over-serving in a way, sometimes a bit larger accounts that aren't yeah. That best fit. Let me preface that. If you are spending a ton of time, basically trying to make a square pit peg fit in a round hole, even if it's a, that's a big account, like it ends up.

Costing you more, in terms of time, in terms of attention that you could have been giving to other customers who are better fit and have much more of a chance of sticking around. I think that's also a confidence issue, right? Being confident [00:30:00] about. Hey, this is the strategy that we're going to take here and our time might be better served doing something else.

Andrew Michael: [00:30:07] Yeah, it's funny. I saw something on LinkedIn yesterday before with just a picture of a leopard that had its poor around the Gazelles. Yes. Your biggest customer with your CSM and like how vulnerable you are, but. I think that's also, it comes down to the organization that you're in as well.

And like having the support from leadership is really important. So if that comes from the top down to say, okay you really need to understand our different customers. And at which point they become unprofitable and which point they become more work than the value that they're delivering to us.

And like you said not good fit customers to begin with. So maybe our tool isn't suited to their mother, having that ability to step back and say no, and not worry that. If you lose that customer, you're going to lose your job. I think that makes a big difference. So it's good that it's like yourself pointing that out, like having leadership in place that really gets that and understands that can actually [00:31:00] allow you to do a better job, others that are really going to be successful with it.

Erica Ayotte: [00:31:04] Totally agree. Totally agree.

Andrew Michael: [00:31:06] It's been a pleasure having you today. I really enjoyed the chat is any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with anything they should be aware of how they can keep up to speed with your work.

Erica Ayotte: [00:31:15] Oh, sure. You can connect with me on LinkedIn if you'd like, it's just Erica, you should be able to find me.

But yeah, no, I think that's it. I had a lovely conversation. Thank you for inviting me.

Awesome. Thanks. Best of luck going forward.

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Erica Ayotte
Erica Ayotte
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My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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