THE STARTUP CHAT

Steli Efti:

Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti.

Hiten Shah:

This is Hiten Shah.

Steli Efti:

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, we’re going to do a tips episode on  how to stay close to your customer as your business grows. We’ve talked about this  many times with Heaton. Whoever understands that customer best ultimately will own that relationship and  will get those customers. This was a big topic recently in our team. We just  did a team retreat in Dublin Heaton and …

Hiten Shah:

Cool.

Steli Efti:

A big topic was customer intimacy. How can we stay close and close into our  customers to serve them better, to understand them better, to get more insights. So why  don’t we just go back and forth on the tips and share ways that people  can stay close to their customers and cultivate customer intimacy as they’re building, launching, and growing their business?

Hiten Shah:

Okay, I’m going to start by asking you a question.

Steli Efti:

Boom. Let’s go.

Hiten Shah:

This is kind of a tip, but it’s like, when’s the last time you got  on a sales call yourself for Close.io?

Steli Efti:

That probably was four or five weeks ago.

Hiten Shah:

Cool, great. I think one tip I have is if you’re doing sales and you  have a sales team, as executives under CEOs, even the marketer on the team, whatever,  should just consider getting on a sales call. Whether it’s to listen in or actually  do the sale. That’s my crazy idea to kick it off. I’m glad you said  four or five weeks ago and not a year ago.

Steli Efti:

I love it. Yeah, and I feel even guilty saying that, because I was like,  Yeah, I …

Hiten Shah:

Yeah, I figured.

Steli Efti:

I feel like I should do this more often. All right, but building on that  tip, so … I think there’s almost … There’s a few function in the team  that are going to be really close to the customer, right? Sales calls gives you  one type of insight.

Hiten Shah:

Yup.

Steli Efti:

Usually you’re talking to prospects. People that are not yet customers. You could do support.  I just saw recently some … A tweet became really popular. It was showing a  founder doing customer support. I think in email and on the phone. A founder CEO,  and then it was just some famous VC tweeted it, and it became a whole  thing. But doing customer support even if it’s just one week out of the month  or one week out of the quarter or a day, could be super useful.

Hiten Shah:

Yeah, for my first two products, I did customer support for the first two years.

Steli Efti:

They go two years?

Hiten Shah:

For most of that time, it was doing it myself. It’s just because nobody else  … Yeah, there’s just nobody else on the teams to do it. It just wasn’t  their problem, and they were doing other stuff that was much more important that doing  customer support. I was doing it. That made it so that I was so close  to the customer. We were able to iterate on that. Even at Crazy Egg, after  those two years, my wife Amy does a lot for that company. She was just basically literally we built a lot of product just by looking at customer support and  improving it based on what we heard. Then until we kind of built the team  out and things like that. I would say that for me customer support is key.  I mean right now for any of the products that we have that are kind  of at earlier stage, it’s literally the founders doing support. We don’t have a support  team. We don’t outsource it anywhere. We just do it, so I can’t highlight what  you said enough. I know that tweet that was shared. I retweeted it too was  out there, but I almost started laughing. I actually literally laughed my ass off when  I saw the tweet, because I’m, “Wait, this should be something everybody does. I don’t  understand why this tweet is so popular.”

Steli Efti:

Yeah, it’s because they don’t. For us, I think for … When we launched Close  the first year, basically everybody was doing support. We’re a team of six people. We  all had accounts on our support desk software, and we all would go in there  and answer tickets at all times. Then as support started ramping up, one of the  tree co-founders Antony basically became the first full-time person on support. He for the three  or four years was full-time doing support as one of the founders. He built a  support team and just this year, he kind of was pushed out of support. He’s  now just going in there occasionally like we all do, but for the first three  and a half – four years one of the founders was doing full-time support. Being  super, super close to the customers that way. Doing support regularly is just a super  powerful way to hear the pain points of your customers, to understand how they truly  feel about your product, once they’ve been using it for a while. It’s super important  thing to understand your customers. Outsourcing support is something that just I will never understand.  How? Why would you want to take this amazing thing that gets you really, really  close to your customers and give it to a stranger? Then lose out on all  that relationship building. Lose out on all that understanding. Lose out on all the ideas  on how to improve your product. That just seems crazy to me. All right, so  but in the vein of going back and forth, another things I’ll point out and  another thing you should be doing. I’ve said this many, many times, and I’ll keep  saying it: visiting your customers. Spending time with your customers in person. There’s really …  There’s three flavors to we’ve tried out a lot this year. The third one we’re  just about to test and try out. One is you can go and visit your customers, especially if it’s B2B, you can just go to their office and visit them.  There’s nothing more powerful than that. There’s nothing more powerful than visiting your customer in  their natural habitat. Seeing how they use your product. See? There’s also something incredibly gratifying.  I was just in London and we visited a big customer, and walking to a  room full screens where there’s I don’t know, 50, 60 people, and seeing your software in all these screens. I don’t know, but there’s something uniquely gratifying and fulfilling about  that, that you can’t get by just looking at a dashboard with X amount of  users using your product today. You can just see your software out in the wild  being used by real people just can be a big boost for motivation and inspiration.  But talking to these users, hearing about their problems, seeing what other software they’re using  on their computer setups, talking to management and asking … Learning about their growth goals  and how your software is going to help them or hinder them. There’s so much  insight, so much context. When you visit customers it’s just … It’s one of the  most powerful ways to develop intimacy. On top of that, one thing we’ve started doing  this year and it’s been very, very successful is doing customer meetups. We visit a  bunch of customers, but then we’ll throw an event one night and we’ll just invite  all customers in the city to drop by, have drinks, talk to us. We’ll show  them a little bit about the roadmap and the things we are about to build  in the future and get feedback and get Q&A session with them. These events have  been incredibly useful and powerful. Having our customers mingle with each other, give each other  tips that’s been super, super useful. One thing we are about to try out, something  we haven’t done yet is to do customer dinners. So going to a city and  inviting a smaller group, but instead of doing a big meetup with tons and tons  of folks showing up, you just select maybe five to 10 people and you’d invite  them to dinner. You have two hours of a really intimate dinner with them, where  you talk about their goals, their challenges, your product, their products, what they’re doing. Just  establish even more intimate and really in-depth, good relationship. We’re going to be trying that  out soon, but just spend time with your customers. Visit them, invite them to parties  and events, go out for dinner with them. It’s one of the most powerful things  for you to understand your customers better and build the right things for them and  succeed. That’s a really, really big one.

Hiten Shah:

Couldn’t agree more. I mean whatever you can do to get close to them and  do it on a regular basis. That’s just exactly why I started with my question.  I think there’s a really simple trick, tip, whatever, that really works, which is just  think to yourself how many … Whether it’s the beginning of the week or end  of the week, how many customers am I going to talk to this week? Regardless  of what part of the team you’re on. I think that can be really useful.  I know sales people are doing that all the time, because some customer support people  are doing it all the time. One of the key kind of challenges as a  company scales that people have is the founders getting further and further away from the  customer and relying on team members to stay close to the customer. That’s why I  like … One thing I’ve seen really great CEOs do is they … Especially when  they … Let’s say they take over as CEO of a company, they actually do  customer visits in person. As part of their onboarding process into the company, so that  they can get a really intimate perspective from the customers about what’s up with the  product and what’s going on and say hi to them.

Steli Efti:

I love that. Let me ask you this. One thing that we realize is sometimes  you start … As you start building your product, you’re serving a specific user. In  our case, we were the first CRM to really focus on the salesperson, so not  to build CRM to sell to management, but we’re building a CRM to empower the  end user, the salesperson. That made us make a lot of decisions very differently from  all the other competitors in the market. That really formed a product philosophy and point  of view, and made Close what it is and what it was. But as the  business grew, one funny thing is as we started building a success team, as we  started taking care of our biggest customers, we fell into a potential trap of spending  more and more time talking to the managers, the admins, the high-level decision makers at  our customers. Have them be kind of the gate keeper and the filter through which we were receiving feedback, so we would have … The earliest we would talk to  every single user, but as our customers grew and as our business grew and now  we have a shit ton of customers, we started naturally just getting a point of  contact. That point of contact naturally started being some manager or some higher up person that’s not really doing the job of sales. So now instead of talking to those  40 people that are using the software every single day to close deals, our success  team would talk to that … The head of growth or revenue whatever who was  responsible for managing these people and setting processes in place and all that, but not  using the software every day themselves to close deals, to drive revenue. This happened in  such tiny tabs, steps that we really missed it. We just recently realized, wow we’re  now spending a lot more time talking to these gate keepers than talking to the  end users. We just started thinking about ways for us to reverse that and balance  out that trend. I’m just curious to hear about your thoughts and how do you  … As your business scales and grows, how do you make sure that even bigger  customers … You stay in touch with the end user on an individual level, and not just with some person that … A lot of times these end users they  won’t send support tickets. They won’t call us. They will be talking to their point  person internally and that point person comes and talks to us. How do you circumvent  that to make sure that you don’t just get a very filtered version of reality,  but you still stay in touch with the end users which we care a lot  about?

Hiten Shah:

That’s great question. The one way I learned that you can do that is by  actually having … I’ll start by saying different parts of the company talk to different  types of customers. The part of the company that tends to talk to that end  user is the part of the company that needs to worry about that end user  experience. Usually, it’s either customer success, customer support, whatever you want to call it, or  product. Usually end product. If you’re doing more user research and actually trying to improve  the experience of the product, you’re generally going to be talking to end users. If  you’re a CEO or an executive or somebody in the company who generally doesn’t talk to the end user, then you can go to that team and do a user  research session with end user and start learning more about them. For me it’s as  a company scales, different parts of the company really start talking to different types of  customers. Just like you said, sales talk to prospects. I consider them a customer, because  they give you a certain perspective. They might be a customer of someone else’s product  right now. But they’re still a customer and they’re still important. All those different types  of customers or different stages of the customers that gives you a different perspective. My  short answer is just support and product tend to talk to that end user a lot more than sales, let’s say.

Steli Efti:

Right. What else? Is there another tip? Another thing that we can think of in  terms of how to generate customer insights? How to stay really close to a customer  as the team goes? Is there any other pattern that companies fall into as they  start growing where they start losing touch with their customers?

Hiten Shah:

It’s almost like you get so busy with operations and the internals as your company  that you don’t … You forget about the externals. The externals being people that are  outside your company, those customers. It’s almost like out of a forgetfulness. It’s almost not  out of laziness usually. It’s just out of being forgetful about it. So for me, and I know we’ve talked about this a bunch, but for me, product is everything  and the customer has to use the product. If the product sucks, customer won’t use  it. Oftentimes, they won’t complain about it either. What I’ve seen is if you were  good at founders looking at the product and making improvements, if they were engineers or designers or whatever on their own, over time they have other roles and other jobs.  Someone else is either tasked with either improving the product, or it’s just not getting  improved as much just because you got product market fit. Not you felt like you’re  done, but you kind of felt like you’re done. That’s not the case. To me  it’s just forgetfulness that I am always looking to fight. Fight in the perspective of  … As I said, how many customers did you talk to this week? How many  are you going to talk to next week? Those kind of just questions in your  head regardless of what part of the company you’re in can be really helpful. Because  if you’re not talking to at least a few customers every week, you probably don’t  have a good pulse on what’s going on with the customer. You can look at  data and see that there’s issues or problems or whatever, but at the end of  the day, it’s that customer touch, that customer conversation that’s really going to have the  biggest impact in your learnings about what to do. I think it’s just a forgetfulness.  We all forget at some point that … It’s because we get busy with other  things. But yet, the customer is what matters because without them, we don’t have a  business.

Steli Efti:

I love it. Let’s just wrap this episode up on that note. Such a powerful  one. All right. Don’t have fear of missing out, have fear of missing touch with  your customers, right?

Hiten Shah:

That’s right, I like that. Yeah, I like that.

Steli Efti:

All right. So go and spend time with them, talk to them, listen to them,  and then you’ll be able to serve them better and that’s going to be …  The foundation’s going to allow your business to grow and deserve that growth. That’s it  from us for this episode. We’ll hear you very, very soon.

Hiten Shah:

Later.