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March 13 - March 20, 2023
When lovability is strong, customers feel like the product and company make them better at what they do today and inspire them to excel at even more meaningful work tomorrow. They are confident that your product will solve problems that they cannot even foresee. You are giving them serious mojo.
Customers may be the final arbiters of love, but employees are its agents, creating the CPE that earns love and loyalty.
“Build to exit” encourages shortcuts. Instead, build something that you feel good about and love working in. You will create products that earn customer love, grow organically and authentically, and build a valuation based on solid fundamentals, not promises.
According to First Round Review, the chance of building a billion-dollar company is .00006 percent.13 Those are the same odds as your vote being the one vote that decides a presidential election.14
In a marketplace where customers have few alternatives, the MVP philosophy can fuel growth. But today’s consumer has many products to choose from in virtually any category — especially in technology. In this world, the MVP strategy is a deathtrap. It aims for “good enough,” not great. It produces products that sort of work but never delight. It breeds an employee culture that is about making the sale, not making the customer fall in love.
If your product is not good, no salesperson will make it lovable.
I realized that the best Customer Success people are like great tour guides. They understand that their fundamental job is to share what they know and to ensure that their customers have a meaningful experience.
Disregard everything that is not tied to creating an exceptional CPE.
In our increasingly transactional world, real growth comes from long-term customer happiness. That occurs when customers love your product or service and not only want to do business with you but want your company to thrive.
Instead of launching with basic functionality and a promise to add more in the future, MLPs solve problems and delight customers right out of the box. Their goal is not to make customers say, “Well, it works,” but to exclaim, “This is brilliant!”
The goal is no longer creating what people think is cool but creating what the customer cannot live without.
How do we measure if we are successful? Eighty percent of new product features are the direct result of what customers ask us for. That is our success metric.
What set us apart from the beginning was how we helped our customers solve problems and how we made them feel.
When I have a problem or need, I want someone to help me. I do not want to wait hours or until the next day. That “urgency degradation” tells me that your company is excited about having me as a customer . . . until you close the sale. After that, I am an annoyance.
That is a reminder that real product value precedes any meaningful company valuation.
Take a look at an old black and white photo of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn or any other commercial street from the first half of the twentieth century and you will see that most of the businesses are named after their proprietors. Your name was on the wall. People associated you with the quality of the product you delivered.
Word of mouth was your growth engine and it worked one person at a time. The only way you got people to recommend your business was to deliver value, provide great service, and get to know and care about your customers.
Technology has given us the ability to communicate with people at scale quickly and cost-effectively. But we have convinced ourselves that those costly, pesky human interactions and relationships are not really necessary anymore and engineered them out of the process.
Customers do not fall in love with automated systems. They resent what phone trees and automated support chat bots imply — that companies see their customers as an impediment to business. Even worse, it implies that companies think their customers are too unsophisticated to realize that it is about avoiding one-to-one interactions. You may not think that, but that is the message such policies and systems send.
Give customers the information they need to self-serve but be incredibly responsive when they need to interact with you. Customers fall in love with companies that solve their problems, share their values, and care about them. That only happens when they are dealing with humans, not software.
People want to buy, not be sold to.
We show customers lots of screenshots of what we do, give them a fully functional trial account, encourage them to invite all of their colleagues to use it for 30 days, provide in-application demo data to explore, provide hours of how-to videos and pages of support documentation, and make it easy to get face time with a knowledgeable human who understands what they do about an hour after a request comes in. All that before they’ve committed to spending a dime with us.
When people want human interaction, they have a real need that should be dealt with immediately.
Technology and human interaction work together. That is not a cost. It is part of the product customers pay us to deliver.
When we think a customer is likely to benefit from a human interaction but might be too shy to ask, we reach out to them and suggest a live support session.
When we get a request for help, we make sure the customer engages with a real person as quickly as possible.
This is important even when we are telling customers what they do not want to hear. Some are taken aback at first when we say, “No, we won’t implement your new feature request right now because it is not aligned with one of our core initiatives,” but they all appreciate an honest response and a clear explanation.
Our hiring policy is simple: We hire when it benefits customers.
To build delightful CPEs, big businesses need hyper-focused teams that think and act like startups.
When you only answer to yourself, you can concentrate on building value your way.
When you do not answer to special interests, you get to build the product that you envision and your customers love.
When you have lots of cash on hand, you will be tempted to spend it — even when it is not yours and comes with crushing expectations.
Accountability is the opposite of hoarding credit when things go well or placing blame when they do not. Great leaders distribute praise eagerly, lead from the front, and accept responsibility when things do not go as planned.
In the software business, there are plenty of ways companies pursue unsustainable revenue growth, such as one-off professional service engagements, non-recurring engineering fees, and misaligned acquisitions.
Products should be designed for people. Businesses should be run in a responsive, human-centric way.
TRM is grounded in the belief that sustainable, lasting success and happiness originate in the respect and service of others. The best way to attain your business goals, from consistent profits to personal fulfillment, is to do so indirectly by prioritizing other people’s needs.
People can contact your company with a question, a problem, or even something trivial and get a meaningful response with startling, gratifying speed. This tells the customer, “You are not an interruption of our work, but the reason we are here in the first place.”
TRM reminds you that customers are people and encourages you to treat them all equally. At Aha! we treat trial customers, startups, and Fortune 500 companies with the same responsiveness and respect.
They know that customers ask for new features because they need them to do important things.
Vision defines your purpose. It comes first. Goals are what you will accomplish and when.
Goals should tie to your vision and be easy to understand, actionable, and achievable in three to 12 months.
We have a three-part approach to human interactions: discover, motivate, and build. When you discover, you are trying to understand what is important to the other person. When you motivate, you are trying to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. When you build, you are structuring a long-term relationship.
Building the kind of relationships that lead to a lovable CPE means letting yourself be vulnerable, revealing that you are not an expert in everything, and ceding control to the other person. When we are willing to be open and imperfect, we are at our most human, and that is when real connections happen.
Interruption science insists that interruptions are always detrimental to human performance.
Reframing interruptions as valuable is what makes TRM possible. You start listening to what distractions are trying to tell you — someone needs your assistance. Customers are not trying to waste your time. They have a question only you can answer or a problem only you can solve. That is an opportunity to earn their trust and love. Being interrupt-driven means no longer cursing questions and problems as obstacles to work but seeing them as the work.
Under TRM, all interrupts are created equal. Each is a potential opportunity for value exchange. However, they are created differently in that some create value and others do not. How you filter those is based on understanding your vision and goals. Goals are your filter. Without them, you will be overwhelmed by noise.
Be thrilled that someone wants to interact with you.
Yea or nay now is based on the principle that no one likes to wait and everyone hates to feel ignored. Your customers are happier when someone responds to them quickly, even if you are responding to say, “Sorry, I’m afraid we cannot help you with that.”
