Solutions for Customers - The Sales Engineering & Customer Success Podcast

The Career Opportunity this week is with Intensify who is searching for a Rockstar Customer Success Manager. Check them out @ https://intentsify.io/careers/ learn more!
Shown Notes: This week we had the privilege of hosting Matt Toy, Director of Account Management with Fastly. Fastly's edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services for brands all over the world

We dive into the various descriptions or assertions many have on what Customer Success is or should be vs. the reality. One key area that is discussed is not how to support B2B or B2C, it’s P2P, aka People to People which is often overlooked these days.

Matt shares a few instances on his journey into customer success and why it's critically important when scaling a business, protecting protentional customer churn, and much more. We clearly run out of time to dig deeper into the analytics and myopic views which can spawn hours of conversation. So, that just means we need to host Matt again on the show!

Check out Fastly.com to learn more about their Edge platform
Connect with our guest Matt Toy @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtoy5/
About the Host, Gary Sloper
For 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Success teams Globally. Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer, he explores the scrappy environments people in these roles face and the fun they have. After years of being nudged by his colleagues to come to speak to the masses about the inner workings of supporting customers in fast-moving Tech, it's now here for all to listen and interact with. Please join future topics!
Connect, chat and interact with Gary on
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutions-for-customers-podcast
or www.SolutionsForCustomers.com

Buzzwords. They exist all over Tech and quite often are overused in the industry by more and more people including Solution Architects and CSMs. However, the use of buzzwords is not worded out of malice but more by convenience. This episode was requested by the audience who asked/suggested we discuss not using buzzwords as much as possible replacing well thought out responses. Why? CIOs and other tech decision-makers are product fatigued and will cast aside your solution if they hear nothing but tech word buzz talk. The amount of presentations they see & hear which contain buzzwords has become staggering.

We take a look at a few articles in the market a narrow into some independent research. For example, a Buzzword Soup scenario could look like this:

We are a CLOUD based solution that enables you to effectively embrace DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION providing you our INDUSTRY LEADING AGILE platform which DISRUPTS traditional AI & BIG DATA competition. Wow, that was a mouthful of buzzwords and I still don’t know what we are selling..ha!

Top 10 Hated Tech Buzzwords - Megan Headly

https://www.trustradius.com/buyer-blog/top-10-hated-tech-buzzwords-2019

Tech Buzzwords – GroWire Team

https://www.growwire.com/tech-buzzwords
About the Host, Gary Sloper
For 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Solutions teams Globally. Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer, he explores the scrappy environments people in these roles face and the fun they have. After years of being nudged by his colleagues in the Ecosystem to come speak to the masses about the inner workings of supporting customers in fast-moving Tech, it's now here for all to listen and interact. Please join future topics!
Connect, chat and interact with Gary on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsloper/ or email: [email protected]

This week we shift back to the world of Customer Success where we begin to carve out future episodes on metrics. The first and often only metric which comes to mind in Customer Success is Churn.

Unfortunately, many professionals use the “Churn” metric in Customer Success interchangeably and sometimes forget to parse out variables in the business. It’s also NOT the only metric used in the Customer Success organization, however, we’ll start here first.

Churn discussions:

Churned Customer Logos (cancelled customers)

Churned Revenue (Revenue reduced in the business, can be a complete cancel or downgrade)

o Do you measure both?

o If you downgrade an existing product but increase revenue with a cross-sell is that bad?

Net Chun/Net Revenue

Several KPI metrics exist when running a Customer Success Organization and trust me, we will get to those in future episodes. Today, let’s start with Churn to build a baseline.
About the Host, Gary Sloper
For 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Solutions teams Globally. Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer, he explores the scrappy environments people in these roles face and the fun they have. After years of being nudged by his colleagues to come speak to the masses about the inner workings of supporting customers in fast-moving Tech, it's now here for all to listen and interact. Please join future topics!
Connect, chat and interact with Gary on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsloper/ or email: [email protected]

Season 2 is finally here!
On this episode, we invited Paul McBratney, Senior Solution Engineer with Alert Logic based in Atlanta to join the show. Paul brings a wealth of knowledge and background on the role of a PreSales Engineer, Problem Solver and Story Teller.

Paul is a bi-lingual SE who discusses how getting your teeth cut early into areas such as physical devices (taking apart and rebuilding servers for example), troubleshooting and more helped him early on. He walks through the conversation about how to methodically work with customers but also set the right expectations and the value of “no” when needed. His organization at Alert Logic was founded in 2002 and has a slew of offerings including their SIEMless Threat Management portfolio providing security, compliance and more Globally. Let’s dig into the conversation with Paul.

Paul McBratney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmcbratney/
Alert Logic: www.alertlogic.com
About the Host, Gary Sloper
For 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Success teams Globally. Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer, he explores the scrappy environments people in these roles face and the fun they have. After years of being nudged by his colleagues to come speak to the masses about the inner workings of supporting customers in fast-moving Tech, it's now here for all to listen and interact with. Please join future topics!
Connect, chat and interact with Gary on
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutions-for-customers-podcast
or www.SolutionsForCustomers.com

This week we talk about CenturyLink changing to Lumen and welcome our guest, Jay Hanley from Thrive. Jay is a seasoned Solution Architect and it was awesome to host him on the show.
Jay covers his background which began in Finance & Economics...nothing to do with Tech. We're talking numbers, graphs, supply and demand all of the subjects many of us avoided so we could take a programming class, ha!
In all seriousness, his background in business lends itself well when solving critical workload challenges with his customers. He's not simply putting a demo together or explaining the finer points of his value-prop....he talks about breaking it down for each customer. Every company has a slightly unique business case and we ask Jay how to perform in that scenario as a Solution Architect.
Check out Thrive.com to learn more about their solutions & services.
Connect with Jay Hanley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjhanley3/
About the Host, Gary Sloper
For 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Success teams Globally. Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer, he explores the scrappy environments people in these roles face and the fun they have. After years of being nudged by his colleagues to come to speak to the masses about the inner workings of supporting customers in fast-moving Tech, it's now here for all to listen and interact with. Please join future topics!
Connect, chat and interact with Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsloper/
Follow us:: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutions-for-customers-podcast
www.SolutionsForCustomers.com