[00:00:00] Rebecca Stone: Marketing today is far more technical, far more detailed, far more product driven than I think it's given credit for in terms of the tech stack, in terms of the data, understanding the data analysis, the building of things using AI prompting tools and things like that.

[00:00:25] Andrew Michael: This is CHURN.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest-growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:37] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative turn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrap, profitable, and growing.

[00:00:51] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics, and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:02] Andrew Michael: Hey, Rebecca. Welcome to the show.

[00:01:04] Rebecca Stone: Hi, Andrew. It's great to be here.

[00:01:06] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Rebecca is the Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Plume, where she leads the entire customer journey from brand and acquisition through to customer success, retention, and expansion. And before joining Plume, Rebecca was SVP of Revenue Marketing and Customer Solutions Marketing at Cisco, overseeing a $50 billion networking portfolio and previously served as CMO of Meraki. My first question for you today, Rebecca, is what happens when you put marketing and customer success under the same leader?

[00:01:38] Rebecca Stone: It's a great question and hopefully they both get better. It is my hope. I would say that I've only been doing the chief customer role for about six weeks now. So it's still pretty fresh. But I would say that I think I am able to be a better advocate into marketing about what the needs are for the customers. I have always been really just very, very strongly held belief that the best marketing is the marketing that addresses customer needs and isn't about just selling a product or selling a company.

[00:02:18] Rebecca Stone: I think it just resonates better and having the consistent voice of the customer in my ear every week from customer calls, customer escalations, customer challenges, talking to my team members on customer success, it's really helping to give me even more clarity on what our customers need. And then I take that back in as the head of marketing to advocate that to the marketing team. So I think that's one. 

[00:02:46] Rebecca Stone: I think in the alternate, providing that voice back into marketing, there's no resistance to it because my marketing team is actually very hungry to understand even more what our customers need. The second thing is, I'm able to be more direct in my asks about getting customer advocacy and customer quotes and things from CS into marketing. So it's getting a little bit easier to do that as well.

[00:03:15] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think that resonates a lot as well from a marketing perspective is really understanding the customer paying points extremely well, understanding the language that they use. All of this content just helps you become a better marketer as a whole.

[00:03:27] Rebecca Stone: It really does. It really does. [crosstalk] Yep. There is nothing bad about having more customer insights being fed into the marketing team.

[00:03:35] Andrew Michael: Exactly. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about the business problem that was trying to be solved with this because it's obvious it's not a common thing to have a single lead across marketing and CS. I mean, we do see sales and CS ladder up to each other quite frequently, but actually you're probably one of the first times I've actually heard of this. So keen to understand motivations behind it.

[00:03:54] Rebecca Stone: Well, we actually have a new CRO as well. He is focusing exclusively on building that new pipeline and sales, but across both our existing customers and our net new customers, I think it might help if I give a little bit of context about Plume and our audience before I talk a little bit more deeply about some of the reasons why customer success and marketing are together.

[00:04:22] Andrew Michael: Yes, please. That was my next question, so...

[00:04:25] Rebecca Stone: Yep. Plume sells exclusively to ISP's internet service providers. So if you think about large telephone companies like Verizon and AT &T, and you think about the largest cable companies like Comcast and Charter, those types of companies and the 5,000 total other ISPs that are across the globe are who we focus on. So it's a very, very small market. We're not looking at a large demand gen sort of operation engine.

[00:04:58] Rebecca Stone: A lot of what marketing is doing is focused on account-based marketing that is working incredibly closely with both our sales and CS partners in order to be very specific and targeted about how we go into certain accounts, how we build relationships. And they're very, very long sales cycles. So a net new business to us, a sales cycle is minimum 18 to 24 months. It could take two to three years in some cases to develop a relationship with a net new customer. 

[00:05:31] Rebecca Stone: And even the sales with our existing customers for new line items is rather long. So some of the biggest opportunity is expansion of existing business within our existing customers. And a lot of what the marketing team is doing is focused on helping to build awareness, helping to drive relationship things at events and road shows with our existing customers in order to build that business.

[00:06:00] Andrew Michael: That makes a lot more sense as well. I think now when you frame it in the context of the markets, and as you said, like 5,000 potential customers, you know who they are. It's not sort of like the typical demand gen motion in marketing. And really, if the main value is driving expansion, I think typically most custom success teams are the ones closest on the field running this and...

[00:06:20] Rebecca Stone: A hundred percent. And there is a lot of just interaction across the board between both the demand gen side of my marketing team and the product marketing side in order to be able to just stay informed and provide the resources that those teams need. And I don't mean this as a dig to our ISP customers, but ISPs are highly demanding. They want a lot of information. They are highly technical themselves. So they ask for a lot of technical depth and technical understanding of the things that they're doing before they commit to it. And so there's a lot of close relationships between both sales, CS, and then with marketing.

[00:07:03] Andrew Michael: Interesting. And I think it's all like a normal natural path I've seen within companies is life cycle marketing and CS. Often there's almost conflicts from that perspective because marketing will typically have one idea of what the lifecycle marketing should look like and thing. And then CS has another. How do you have the team structured and then how are they like collaborating together, rolling up into a single leader? Like, are you operating still in individual teams? Or what does that structure look like?

[00:07:30] Rebecca Stone: Yeah, so we're definitely operating in individual teams. I have a traditional marketing structure in terms of comms, content, product marketing, and integrated marketing are the four real key areas. Integrated marketing owns the relationship with the customer and thinking about how to build an integrated plan against different channels that is custom for the type of accounts that we're going after based on whether it's persona within the account based on size of accounts.

[00:08:01] Rebecca Stone: I think one of the things that I did not mention is a lot of people understand that there is these very, very large ISPs that have thousands of people working for them and very large budgets. But there are even more, probably 1500 just in the US, small telcos across the country that have, were founded as a result of those larger companies not being able to address the needs a lot in rural areas, a lot in smaller towns. And so those are very, very relationship-driven accounts and being able to understand both from our CS and sales relationships, how marketing can help support those is very important.

[00:08:45] Rebecca Stone: So we meet regularly with the customers and integrated marketing is designed to focus on that. So that's the marketing side. From the CS side, we have a TAM, a Technical Account Manager team. We have an Operations team that helps with process. And then we have the traditional CSMs who are focused on building the relationships with the customer. That team is segmented by size of accounts. So we have a tier one, a tier two, and a tier three and tier four kind of structure. And that aligns roughly to the largest to the smallest accounts that we serve.

[00:09:25] Andrew Michael: So you pretty much still like doing it as you said, like typical two teams marketing and CS and just rolling up into yourself.

[00:09:33] Rebecca Stone: Sorry, I was just going to say I think the closest overlap is that CS and customer marketing relationship. We have our Customer Advisory Board; we have all of our comms that go out to customers. That's where that integration is probably the most overlapping.

[00:09:50] Andrew Michael: Okay. And then in terms of sort of metrics and how the teams are measured in terms of performance and yourself in this role, what does that look like? What are the teams focused on then? Especially in this case where like majority of revenue is probably coming from expansion revenue, not net new business.

[00:10:07] Rebecca Stone: Yeah. So a lot of what we try and focus on is influence, making sure that we are creating the conversations that need to happen from a marketing perspective.  So we measure marketing influence more than we measure net new leads, but both are important. We're still trying to get net new companies and we're still trying to reach them. So we are looking at things like MQLs and pipeline that is generated. From our CS side, what I'm looking at is metrics that are more aligned to adoption and expansion.

[00:10:41] Rebecca Stone: And so we have NRR and GRR goals that we try and focus on. Net Revenue Retention for NRR, GRRs–gross revenue retention. And then we also have metrics around what are called CSQLs, qualified leads that the CS team finds that are then passed on to sales for those net new businesses. And the last is really focused on adoption in terms of usage metrics. 

[00:11:13] Rebecca Stone: So we have the concept of a truck roll in an ISP, which is something that is very unique to internet service providers. A truck roll is when you think about you call your service provider, and you have an issue of some kind and they get you to reset your modem. They try and resend the signal a couple of times. It escalates and escalates. And finally, they agree that they need to send somebody out to your house to fix it. That's what's called the truck roll. They have to roll the truck out. They have to send somebody. That is a very expensive cost to the service provider in order to be able to send that out. 

[00:11:51] Rebecca Stone: So we look at how do we reduce that? How do we contain truck rolls by digital containment from our products that we are sending out? How do we make sure that we are reducing the time of calls, reducing the need for calls by proactively resolving issues that might be in the home that is happening. And so all of those things are things that we look at in order to be able to make sure that adoption and customer satisfaction are really there.

[00:12:22] Andrew Michael: You're nice. There's quite a few things I want to double-click into. I want to take them in the order that you mentioned them. The first one is you're saying that marketing is measured against influence. And I find this like a very interesting concept, obviously, because it makes sense in the context of the business. But what are you specifically looking at then? What are the activities marketing is responsible for and doing? And how do you, at the end of the day, say, "We're going to do these five or six activities to increase influence in this way"? Can you paint a picture?

[00:12:51] Rebecca Stone: So the biggest thing that where I look at influence is events. We do a series of third-party events and we do hosted events as well. And making sure that the right people are in the room at the right time to be able to educate them is an important thing. So we're tracking who's coming, did we get our target accounts? Did we get our target personas within the account to attend? Did we get new people at the account to attend? So those types of metrics are things that we're looking at. 

[00:13:21] Rebecca Stone: We also look at the broader influence of things like sales enablement, which is one of the most important things that we do. I just actually got off a call this morning of what we call power hours, which are internal calls that we are doing weekly to educate our teams on net new products that are coming out, changes to pricing that we might have, packaging changes that we have, making sure that our sales and CST members are prepared and ready to go and have a conversation with our customers is a intangible way to measure influence as well.

[00:13:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I literally just got off one of those calls 30 minutes ago talking about new product updates. So I think why it's interesting as well is the idea of marketing typically is to attract and acquire new business and the focus is normally like net new. Whereas now, it sounds like you really want to focus on... And I think one of the problems we hear a lot as well from the show and probably that says a top three reason for Churn would be as when your customer champion leaves. And so I think obviously having a metric like influence where you're trying to always get the right people in the room is a good way to be able to combat and tackle that.

[00:14:34] Rebecca Stone: And make sure that you're having more than one person who understands and knows and can advocate for you. Absolutely. This is incredibly important. I agree.

[00:14:44] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And is there sort of a way where you're measuring on that on an account basis to understand how much influence you have within an organization? Is that sort of the idea behind it?

[00:14:53] Rebecca Stone: Yeah, it's more about how marketing is influencing pipeline is how we are measuring it today. But those metrics, what you're talking about, the number of people who we are talking to, the types of personas have benefit on both sides, making sure that we are building those relationships. It's even as simple and silly as for every QBR, we make sure that marketing is sending cookies and snacks to the QBR at the customer meeting to make sure that we are an event that people want to go to rather than just ignore or join from their laptop.

[00:15:32] Rebecca Stone: It's silly things like that, that actually make a difference because it's actually getting people together in a physical location and getting excited about something that isn't just selling our product that is driving things like influence. It's hard to measure in the metric format, but those things make a difference, and they add up in terms of the relationships that we're building.

[00:15:55] Rebecca Stone: And I think over time, what we will see is that we will have more customer advocates who are willing to speak out publicly at events and things. And that's how eventually we will be able to measure it. I think that's a six to 12 months out sort of way to measure it. But the ultimate goal is getting those advocates to just be able to want to speak out more.

[00:16:18] Andrew Michael: What's the funnest or craziest idea that the team has had or has to, in the future, to bring people to get them excited about attending these events? You mentioned cookies being one.

[00:16:28] Rebecca Stone: Yeah. I mean, I think our events leader is probably one of the best at creating experiences that people do not want to give up. We are working on a couple of programs and projects where we just are--and I'm not going to give it away, but the experience that the happy hour is after is elevated from what we have been doing in the past. I can talk a little bit about some of the things she's done. 

[00:16:54] Rebecca Stone: We were at an event where she took a post-held ballroom and transformed it into a tropical islands. All of this green, lush greenery everywhere, and you walked in, and you felt like you were at a luau. And so things like that where the experience is just a one of "I can't believe that I'm in a ballroom and I feel like I'm at a luau" are things that are just––she's really phenomenal at that.

[00:17:26] Andrew Michael: Memorable. Nice. Okay. And then the next thing I wanted to double click into following on was obviously on the CS side. You mentioned NRR, GRR being core metrics. I think there's obviously this debate we have quite frequently on the show whether or not CS should be responsible for revenue metric. And I think my opinions is settled on now that if you're not responsible for revenue and driving expansion, you don't get taken seriously in the organization. And that's where you get treated as a cost center rather than a revenue driver. What's motivation there as well? How is that team structured, and maybe how are they compensated as well at the back of that?

[00:18:03] Rebecca Stone: So this, the revenue-generating component of CS, is new under me. And it is because of, for the same reason that you just said. I think CS needs to be seen as a contributor to the business, not just a cost center, and the only way to do that is to really build up the skills of the team to be able to make sure that it's not just renewals that we are focused on but expansion. So CS specifically is responsible for renewals, of course, of existing products but how our product is sold is by license and those licenses are by the different suites that we sell.

[00:18:43] Rebecca Stone: We sell one that is specifically designed for the operator, the user. We sell one that is designed for the care team. We sell one that is designed for data. And then we also sell one that is used in the home and is deployed in a router in a household. All of those things work together in a flywheel-type of model to feed each other one. So it's about expanding the use cases and expanding the number of licenses that are being used, whether it is by a care team that is gone from doing a tier three care team using our product to the full expansion of all of care, using it for more use cases within care, using our products in the homes differently.

[00:19:30] Rebecca Stone: So you might have a telephone company who is only using Plume in the top tier of customers because they are looking to really provide that extra layer of support to their most loyal and highest ARPU revenue-generation type of users. And really what we want to do is have Plume in all of the households because having it in all of the households fuels the data that gets back into the operator suite and helps them to troubleshoot faster, which then helps solve the care problems faster.

[00:20:06] Rebecca Stone: So making sure that our CS team is looking at how each of the different parts of the platform interact with another one and making sure that the telephone company is getting the best outcome by using the full suite of products to the best of their ability becomes very, very important. And so that's where the revenue generation grows is from making sure that the usage is used in a correct way.

[00:20:34] Andrew Michael: So you mentioned as well that I think somewhere that the licenses themselves are really like device-based. So I think one of things, obviously, then in this case is like for your customers, they need to be growing themselves. We need to be growing to some degree as well. And so in a lot of ways, you're providing like a B2B2C service where your product needs to help with retention of theirs and expansion. So how do you view that on your end and what does that look like?

[00:21:01] Rebecca Stone: I love that question. And it really is, I think, that's where the different parts of our portfolio of products come into looking across the entire ISP journey. From the moment that a customer signs with an ISP, we have products that help navigate that for a customer. And like I said, so typically you are signing up online for a service or you're calling into care to sign up for a service. Some of what the care suite of our product does is help to address those needs in a way that's very fast, very efficient, and helps to reduce the amount of time that a customer service team member spends on a call.

[00:21:43] Rebecca Stone: And so that means that they can take more calls because you're reducing the amount of time that they spend on a call. Then that customer needs to set up the product. And in that customer journey, that setup can lead to all sorts of problems, whether or not they are someone who is like my mom and has no idea what she's doing or like me who has been in networking for long enough to pretend that I know what I'm doing or to somebody like my dad who's an electrical engineer and has no problem setting up anything that is networking-related. 

[00:22:17] Rebecca Stone: Even in my extended family, three different examples of people who call and are looking for support in very, very different ways. My dad doesn't want support, anything else than if something goes wrong. I want support, maybe as I'm setting up rules for my kids to make sure that nobody's getting on any websites that I don't want them to. And my mom needs step-by-step support literally from like, "How do I plug in the box?" to, "How do I make sure that it's running and how do I make sure that the things are everywhere that they need to be?"

[00:22:50] Rebecca Stone: Each of those three different experiences requires different data coming from the household and requires a different type of thoughtfulness in terms of how a CS person or how a digital care, if you're doing a chatbot or something, responds. And some of what are the actual AI engine that powers a lot of what we're doing helps adapt and understand those persona types based on the questions they ask based on demographic information and helps to adjust the needs to customize the experience to a customer. And then ongoing, you still need to make sure that your sites are–your hardware is updated. We help to manage that without touching it.

[00:23:34] Rebecca Stone: We help to proactively identify when there are outages in different areas in different regions. All of those different parts of the customer journey are things that we touch from a product perspective and that allow us to really help our customers improve their customers experience. The outcome is better for an end user in a home because the full suite of products that we deploy is being used by one of our customers. And then to the point that I said earlier, you can see that in how truck rolls are experienced and how CSAT scores are on boxes that have Plume versus don't have Plume. You see it in all of these subtle ways that show up in terms of reducing the amount of churn that our customers have at their accounts.

[00:24:26] Andrew Michael: It's super interesting. So in a lot of ways, like in some ways you have a higher impact in retention than your customers do, like the control over retention because you're influencing that activation experience, you're influencing that support experience, and then you're leveraging the knowledge across all your customers to be able to provide that better experience.

[00:24:46] Rebecca Stone: You summed it up perfectly. You want to come in and help market Plume for me. Maybe have a Plume podcast with Andrew Michael.

[00:24:58] Andrew Michael: But I mean, it is like an interesting launch point because I think when you're talking about in my mind, like the NLGs were things like Stripe, for example, I think they've created a checkout experience that's highly optimized because they've had the ability to be able to see that across millions of different merchants and stuff. And so obviously, maybe you could create a slightly better, more optimized version for your customer, but the likelihood and resources you need to do that don't make sense, especially when you then start to build these core competencies and expertise around the service.

[00:25:26] Rebecca Stone: And there is a massive amount of... When you think about the amount of data that is coming in from, it's a crazy amount of devices that come through our system from across the globe. The amount of households that we touch is in the multi-multi-millions. And that amount of data is really helping to get the core insights in a security-compliant way to understand what's going on in trending across households and being able to identify those major issues that are happening.

[00:26:03] Andrew Michael: Nice. And so then obviously I think then, how closely does that the product team then end up working with the end customer around these experiences? Because I think different markets will be different, like use cases and challenges. And you mentioned the truck roll or whatever it is. I think that's an interesting metric when it comes to improving reliability and things like that. So what does that look like?

[00:26:26] Rebecca Stone: I think a great story is we identified an issue at one of our customers. The CEO had installed some new products in his house and the hardware, it's so complex when you think about in every home, the hardware that drives your internet connectivity is not just the hardware, it's the software and it is also the chipsets that are in it. And there was some identified issues with chipset plus hardware and our software was what identified where the problems were. But all three needed to then be patched in order to fix the problem.

[00:27:04] Rebecca Stone: And this is a very standard, any type of hardware that you have is a very, very standard kind of challenge that you're going to experience. And the joy of watching our CS team, our product team, our engineering team, all working on this solution that then has convinced this particular telco to go out and make some changes to how the customer experiences Wi-Fi in their homes that is going to make it infinitely better for every customer and really elevate the customer experience.

[00:27:40] Rebecca Stone: Being able to work so closely with our customers on trying to troubleshoot issues that we might see in other parts of the network and then being able to solve those and to improve the experience for our customers is really fun. And we had these pictures of the whole team in the CEO's house, trying to work through and solve the challenges from three different companies plus the telephone company itself, all working together. It really is a great story about how dedicated our teams are to making sure that our customers have the outcomes that they need in order to deliver better service to their customers.

[00:28:20] Andrew Michael: I consider as well being like a maybe potentially even high-tension space or high stressful space because I could really use critical infrastructure. And so the example that you gave, like all three people are going to be pointing fingers at each other and say, "Hey, it's you. It's you. It's you." So figuring it out in those moments really matters. 

[00:28:38] Rebecca Stone: It is challenging, but that's also what makes it fun. And it makes it an experience–

[00:28:42] Andrew Michael: Invaluable.

[00:28:44] Rebecca Stone: Exactly. And invaluable. And what helps drive that talking about influence and customer relationship building, that is how you build that customer relationship with the accounts that we sell to.

[00:28:56] Andrew Michael: Right. So obviously you mentioned at the start, this is you now having both teams under a single team. What's one thing that you're most excited about, like having the two teams working together? Is there any specific thing that comes to mind?

[00:29:09] Rebecca Stone: I definitely cannot wait for those customer advocates to start talking for marketing. Building those relationships and being able to get those advocates, like the example that I just gave, and being able to really develop those relationships that get then plastered all over our website and start attending our road shows and talking to other customers there. I firmly believe there is nothing better than word-of-mouth marketing and customer marketing to other customers, I think it is the number one most successful type of marketing. And so being able to be a part of both sides, building that relationship is going to be exciting.

[00:29:49] Andrew Michael: It sounds like an abuse of power.

[00:29:52] Rebecca Stone: I hope not. [crosstalk] I hope I use my power wisely. [crosstalk] I will be a conscientious deployer [crosstalk] of that power for sure.

[00:30:03] Andrew Michael: But yeah, I think obviously it makes a lot of sense in the context. I think one of the things as well, though, is going back to the revenue side of things. If CS is being responsible for expansion, I think there's always also this debate we have on the show.  Are you jaded the relationship now, and CS has meant to create a relationship with customers? I think from my perspective, I've always found that weird, that topic in discussion, because it's also the alternative is extremely weird. It's like you talk to somebody for a year and then all of a sudden, a renewal comes up and say, "Oh, I can't talk to you about this. You need to talk to some random person you never met." How do you view that, and how does the sales team then collaborate?

[00:30:38] Rebecca Stone: I think that there's two things that I see. One is I think at the end of the day, our customers run businesses and understand that we are also running a business. And so we should not shy away from being able to have a two-sided conversation of, "I'm going to solve this challenge for you. And also, because I solve this challenge for you, let's continue this relationship and renew the relationship and get it running." I think that is a balance that our CST members just simply have to find. And the best ones do it in a way that is enviable because they really do demonstrate that it can be done highly successfully. I would also say that because our sales team is responsible for selling net new products into the business, oftentimes in those smaller companies, the person who is buying the existing product is also buying the net new product.

[00:31:38] Rebecca Stone: And so we have to treat our customers and act as two in a box is the way that it's described a lot. Our sales and CS members are on calls consistently together. They attend QBRs, they attend the weekly calls, they are consistently building the relationships together in order to develop that. There are some places where CS might have a stronger relationship and there are some places where sales might have a stronger relationship. I think in both of those examples, we look to use the other person as a supplement. We don't look to supplant, but we definitely look to compliment and supplement.

[00:32:20] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think that makes quite a bit of sense as well. I think if it's together and it's not sort of isolated, I've noticed experiences in the past where it's like, "Oh, you're going to need to set up a separate call with this person." And then what ends up happening on that call is like, "Oh, so tell me about your problems. What are you experiencing?" And then it's just like, "I've literally spent the last year telling my problems. Like, is this not something that you could have come prepared to the meeting for?" So... 

[00:32:41] Rebecca Stone: Yeah. And I think that while we are developing AI into our product, and I am extremely excited about some of the things that we're going to be able to deliver to our customers, I also think AI as a tool is extremely important for our own internal use as well, operationally. I, personally, am really, at this point, dependent, I think, on products like Gong and products like the AI Note tools and Claude to be able to, when I am going into a customer that I haven't talked to before, getting a summary and understanding of the history of the account, what our CS team or sales team members have talked to them about, what our engineering and product teams have talked to them about.

[00:33:28] Rebecca Stone: And rather than having to go activity by activity in Salesforce and read each one individually, being able to collect all of that information together, put it into Claude, say, "Give me a summary," has been really, really phenomenal. And I think the addition, like I mentioned Gong–we use Gong to collect all of those conversations and get the summaries in Gong between those two things. I don't think that I can survive without it.

[00:33:56] Rebecca Stone: And I would challenge that every single member of a company who touches an account should be doing something similar because to your point, we've all had that experience where you have to repeat yourself three times because somebody new is involved. It should be the onus on the person who is going to that account to understand, first and foremost, as much as you can what's been happening so that you can have an extension of a conversation rather than start the conversation all the way at the beginning again.

[00:34:29] Andrew Michael: Oh, sure. And actually I even, not saying it now, I'm just thinking about two even recent conversations where I've been guilty. I'm doing the same thing. And you mentioned–

[00:34:39] Rebecca Stone: It's so much easier with the tools that we have to get those summaries, like do it, use it, do it first, [crosstalk] and also be responsible in terms of making sure that your notes of your conversation are being fed back into those types of tools so that the next person can have... [inaudible] Yeah.

[00:34:58] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think obviously like AI is the hot topic. I think it's like overtalked at this stage. Maybe give me just one question on the topic is like, what parts of your job that you do today, do you see AI completely replacing in the next 12 months?

[00:35:15] Rebecca Stone: Yeah. I hope it completely replaces building decks for sure. I think that there...

[00:35:22] Andrew Michael: I think it's almost there.

[00:35:24] Rebecca Stone: I joke about that. I think that there is a lot of AI slop. I think what I encourage is, as with any data, that the output is just as good as the input. So if you spend the time to put in good inputs, use the right tools for the right experience. You will get an improved output, but it should not replace the time, the thought, the strategy that is put into the input. And I think that that is never gonna go away.

[00:36:00] Rebecca Stone: And so being thoughtful, using my 25-plus years experience of understanding what a good deck looks like, understanding what a good story looks like, is invaluable to building and having an output of a good deck from a tool. And I still don't think that AI is going to replace storytelling. I think storytelling from humans is always going to be an emotional component to storytelling that you are not going to replace in any way. And I think that storytelling input is far more important than the output that you get if you don't think about it.

[00:36:37] Andrew Michael: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think we're at this stage now where with the models, it's a skill gap, not a model gap anymore. So to your point, you have that experience 25 years understanding what creates a good story. And so I think more and more in our roles, the roles are becoming more strategic in the nature. They're becoming more storytelling in the nature, more understanding of who the customers, who we serve, what are the markets.

[00:37:00] Andrew Michael: And then AI is translating that strategy into the execution layer, which is whether it be slide decks, ads, landing pages. I think some more and more marketers' roles is, and this happened already in products where, in products, had various different roles, they're compressing into a single role. Execution is no longer the bottleneck. It's now taste, judgment, and "what should we build"? And I think the same thing happens in marketing as well.

[00:37:22] Rebecca Stone: Yeah, it is that emotional. I think the biggest thing, I mean, not to get too deep on it, but one of the things that I am most worried about is how does the next generation learn what we learned by doing? And so I think it becomes incredibly important to teach those skills more and more and be more thoughtful about those skills as we're developing the next great talents.

[00:37:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges,  understanding how to go back to first principles to teach the raw skills that you need to be able to guide the models. And if you're not getting the chance to get the experience, write those crappy decks and the beaming and the shitty stories and things that get fine-tuned and improved over time. It's very difficult. Great. I see we're running out of time. So two questions I ask every guest before we wrap up today. First one is: what's one thing that you know today about Churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:38:13] Rebecca Stone: Oh, that one is great. And I think that details matter. I think it's not just about the overall data and the reports and what you see in your spreadsheets, but the details of each account really do matter. Every account, especially in these accounts like we're selling to today where it's relationship-driven, the details and understanding of the history matter just as much as the data on the spreadsheet.

[00:38:42] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think a lot of times data can even be misleading to a certain degree, and things may look good on the surface, but actually under the hood–

[00:38:48] Rebecca Stone: Or vice versa. It could look not great, but if you understand the details of an account, you actually think you understand that there are some times you need to go through some hard times to build a really, really great customer relationship.

[00:39:03] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think an example of that could be like before a new one, you maybe see like an uptick in user activity and things looking healthy, but when you actually got on the scene, they've just been going in and exporting all their files so that they can cancel. And so I think, and looking at those details, understanding the relationships, and standing with people are just as important, so I love that. Last question is, obviously we can take this in the context of your role in marketing or from a customer success standpoint, but what's one question that you wish more people would ask you but they don't?

[00:39:34] Rebecca Stone: So from a marketing perspective, since I answered the last one from a customer service perspective, I think I wish more people asked me about the technical aspects of marketing. And I think that marketing today is far more technical, far more detailed, far more product-driven than I think it's given credit for in terms of the tech stack, in terms of the data, understanding the data analysis, the building of things, using AI prompting tools and things like that. There is an art component in the storytelling, but there is also a technical component that I am a geek about and I love to talk about. And I wish more people would ask me.

[00:40:18] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my background has always been in product and growth, like marketing as well. But I think growth is like the intersection of the two, which is very technical, but at the same time creative because you need to be able to do things.

[00:40:31] Rebecca Stone: It's why I love it. It touches both sides of the brain.

[00:40:34] Andrew Michael: Both sides. Exactly. And I think now we're starting to see more superpowers being given to marketing, which is in the past, it was like we don't have the resources for that right now. And always I can just go build it myself now. And here's that new calculator. Here's that new form. So it's exciting to see what people start to do with these new powers.

[00:40:53] Rebecca Stone: Yeah, I'm excited to see as well.

[00:40:56] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Well, Rebecca has been an absolute pleasure chatting today. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up?

[00:41:02] Rebecca Stone: I just wanted to thank everybody for listening and for the time and if anything that I talked about sounds interesting, feel free to reach me on LinkedIn, and happy to talk about marketing tech or CS or Plume.

[00:41:16] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Well, for the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes for reference to pick up later. And thanks again for joining. Wish you best of luck going forward.

[00:41:25] Rebecca Stone: Thank you.

[00:41:26] Andrew Michael: Cheers. And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael.  I really hope you enjoyed it and you're able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with CHURN.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[00:41:59] Andrew Michael: If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.