Jeff is joined by very special guest and keynote speaker Aaron Thompson of SuccessHacker. Covered lots of ground here, including:

• Customer Journey Mapping and Funnel Acquisition

• The Trough of Disillusionment and Buyers Remorse

• The 3 D's of Customer Success

• Retention Starts with Implementation

• Should CSM’s manage the implementation of the project?

• What does an ideal implementation team look like for a SaaS B2b enterprise-focused company?

Also, check out Aaron's post here with some video explanations of the concepts

You can listen to the podcast here and on Apple, Spotify

Transcript:

Jeff Kushmerek  01:14

Hey, it's Jeff. Just quick note on this episode, there was a mic issue on my end, so it was getting a little distorted. I sent it out for some processing got cleaned up. It just sounds a little compressed and funky. But good news. I don't speak that much on this one. Couple of quick points. Aaron's great, so it's just given the ball and the chicken ran. So enjoy it. And I'll see you next time. Welcome back, I'm here with I would say one of the people I used to see and I'm like, wow, wouldn't it be great if I could connect with Aaron? And then so I've got Aaron Thompson. And one quick note on this. The reason why I was so dying to get Aaron on this podcast is I had some ideas in my head. And Darren did this really great thing, which is like, hey, connect with me. I'm looking forward to talking to more people. And I started talking about this concepts. And then I think I see some of it behind him. And he pulls out his whiteboard behind him. He's like, Oh, here's the whole thing. And I was just like, oh, man, this is awesome. So welcome to I think your first podcast.

Aaron Thompson  02:24

Yeah, this is it. Thank you very much, Jeff. Like I said, I'm so used to speaking into cameras and having people be able to see what I'm talking about. And frankly, be able to see it myself that I hope I'm able to put you know, two cents together here over the next half an hour or so. But I'll do my best.

Jeff Kushmerek  02:41

Well, you're a well known person in the areas of customer success. You've been out there talking about it and doing it for a while now. Why don't you give everyone a little updates or what you do now? And also, if we can have the meaning behind the logo? I would

Aaron Thompson  02:56

I better start with that.

Jeff Kushmerek  02:59

So people know what we're talking about. But once you see this, you'll be like, Oh, I know what we're talking about?

Aaron Thompson  03:04

Well, it's a very good psychological experiment. When I walk into a restaurant or any public place, for example, I'll walk into a bar and I'll walk up to the bar will either say, what's the deal with the donkey and the plunger? They'll say nice unicorn. I love that. Where did you find that shirt? And so it always shows me off the you know, from the get go a little bit about their personality, if they can see the vision or not, you know, are they very realistic and very tactical? Or are they a bit bigger thinker, maybe you can actually see the concept. But that is the idea. We add success coaching, I firmly believe that we are all unicorns, if we get the right tools we aim to do is give customer success managers the tools to be that mythical unicorn that that we're all looking forward to to fill those roles. As far as myself and my current kind of roll with success coaching. I'm our chief revenue officer. So I manage a lot of our large b2b enterprise accounts. Personally, I do a lot of our level one and two delivery, as well as some private delivery for our larger accounts. And then most of the time, I'm spending my days in the top of the funnel, doing some outbound and inbound and all the things that I can to, number one, have people even identify that we exist. And then number two, show them how we can possibly help their organizations.

Jeff Kushmerek  04:23

Yeah, absolutely. And I did not know this until I talked to Aaron, but you provide a certain that this is no strings attached. None of this. He did not ask me to say any of this. But like when I found out about what success had offers, I was blown away because sometimes I get asked to do this. And I'm like, I don't think I can put this together like in a couple of weeks and deliver it. So if you don't mind because I think a lot of you know, as I talked about a lot of people that listen to this either are creating a team for success and implementation and onboarding, where they've been inherited. Maybe they've got one person that does every role post sale, which we can get into on the world. And just talk a little bit about this because I'm always asked First of all, like, Hey, can you just come in and train our resources and things like that?

Aaron Thompson  05:03

Yeah, absolutely. So we originally sought out six going on seven years ago to create a community of customer success professionals. And as we created that community, we realized there is no standardization of how to do this the right way. So with Todd, Andrew and myself, we've all built and scaled Customer Success organizations from the ground up. And we also have training and instructional design backgrounds. And so when you marry those two together, we created the world's first certification in CES for CSMs. Now we have four levels, level five, coming soon, got some leadership things coming out in 2022. And the only officially accredited certification in the discipline of customer success, our graduates get 18 accredited CPE credits that they can then turn into their HR teams and whatnot, all that shows is just that we've had to jump through some hoops and, and our content holds a bit more water than maybe some others out there.

Jeff Kushmerek  06:00

That's good to know. That's great. So okay, you get some concepts, which is great instead of just winging it all the time that I've heard, but I think it would be very valuable to people listening, and one of them is the three dates.

Aaron Thompson  06:11

Yeah, I love the three days. And this is something that I don't know, it's not even in our core cert CSM certification. But somewhere along the line, see, I've got a little chicken brain, right, like I have to boil everything down to the most simplistic possible way. And I can understand really complicated thing. What was

Jeff Kushmerek  06:28

that? Yeah, it's makes me like I'm a five year old, right? It's like, Yeah, well,

Aaron Thompson  06:31

that's what I need. Exactly right. And so I can understand complicated things, if I can distill it down into bite sized chunks. And that's what I looked at with customer success. So if we look at the whole soup to nuts, effort and practice of customer success, what is customer success, it really comes down to first off, we have to define what success is, first and foremost. And if we can't define it, then we certainly can't do the next D, which is deliver it. And once we define what success is in terms of a desired outcome plus a desired experience, that's the formula for the definition, the customer's definition of success, see us equals the customer's desired outcome CEO plus the customer's desired experience, CX. And we've seen this out there in the industry for years now. But then it's like, well, then what do we do from there, then the next step is to deliver that definition. So once we've identified what it is, now we're going to deliver it and we're going to give you what you want, in terms of an outcome. And we're going to give it to you the way that you want it in terms of an experience. And we're going to do that through your lifecycle. And then equally important to delivering that is demonstrating it. And that's where we see sometimes a breakdown in the CS practice, we've defined it, we've delivered it, but that buyer doesn't know it, that champion doesn't know it, they don't realize that you have actually delivered what they said would be success, quote, unquote. And so that that third D is to demonstrate it. So we define it, deliver it, demonstrate it. And that's where business reviews, benchmarking, even reporting, like Spotify does an amazing annual business review for millions of listeners at scale. They send everybody an email that shows you the minutes that you listen to music, and which artists and what time of day, so that you continue to pay your $9 a month next year. That is an annual business review, demonstrating the value that you got for your subscription last year. And it's done at massive scale. My point is you can do this a lot of different ways. But it really comes down to those three Ds define what success is for this person, not a logo or an account, it's a human, demonstrate or deliver that definition and then demonstrate that you've done

Jeff Kushmerek  08:53

so that it's fantastic in your right that people will look at that joint success plan, they'll take it over from sales, and then they'll go work to make sure that stuff happens. But then there's none of that like, Hey, look at where we were 30 days ago, 90 days ago. Now let's take a look at that. I'm not sure why that is if people are just shy or they don't think to do to do this or whatnot. But it's a definitely a trend that I see a ton of Yeah,

Aaron Thompson  09:18

you know, yeah. And I think where it starts is the leadership gets tasked with driving adoption, or engagement in the product, because that's good for us, that creates sticky customers and we now become a, you know, a part of their work life and we're a mission critical application for them. And that is good for us. And we think by secondary that's good for the customer, but it's really not right, like what they care about is their outcomes by way of their experience. And so we get tasked at the leadership level with driving adoption. We then focus our CSMs effort into driving adoption, rather than quantifying what outcomes the customer really wants, what are they actually looking to accomplish? And then showing them that, hey, you said you wanted to accomplish this thing. And we did it by this date. And now what's the next one? And then you know, you map out and you continue through the journey, onward and upward.

Jeff Kushmerek  10:14

And I'm sure you do this as well, too. But sometimes what I see is, here's a classic one, like it's an enterprise, you mostly just do enterprise b2b implementation stuff. And something will be like six months long. And it'd be like, Well, if you had a QBR with the customer, yeah. And they're like, No, we're still in implementation is. So you've done nothing. In the last six months, like, maybe you've moved data over, maybe they're able to see, like, all these little things that people, I think, just they get super tactical, and wound down in the, I need this live by this date. And then it needs to become like, let's take your level above, let's go talk to the person who is, you know, reporting to the person or whatever that you're dealing with, or vice versa, and then show them all the things that you've been able to accomplish, like and do that more. It doesn't have to be 90 days, you can do every 30 days, it just, this is where we were this is where we're going and things like that. So absolutely

Aaron Thompson  11:08

awesome. As we accomplish outcomes, we need to show the customer we've done it, right. And you've got your executive sponsor, and you've got your champion, and that champion gets it because they work with you every day. They know what the sponsor who owns the p&l in the budget doesn't necessarily and that's why that demonstration D is so important.

Jeff Kushmerek  11:26

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so I just laugh, we just people don't know, kind of write some topics out in advance. And I don't know if you'd seen this, but there was a TV show or questioning where they said, George Bush, great president, or greatest president, right. This next question was like, is implementation important for the most important?

Aaron Thompson  11:50

Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And obviously, to your point, I think it's, it's probably a little loaded. But that being said, I don't think it's inappropriately a loaded question. Because it is truly the most critical stage of the customer lifecycle, when a customer is in implementation, or onboarding, in general, really, they are the most vulnerable that they're ever going to be, they are putting in the most effort to learn the products to implement it, to train their team, to learn your people, your processes, all of the things that go into that. And then you are doing the same thing. You're learning about them and their proficiencies and deficiencies and what their politics look like internally, who works well with others, and who doesn't, and all of this. And so collectively, it's the highest level of effort that we're going to ever have in that lifecycle. And because of that, it creates friction, and anxiety, I've already got a million things to do, I don't have time to learn your new thing. And so if we don't navigate that correctly, we can set the trajectory of the relationship off in a less than positive way, if we do leverage, and that's the point, we have more leverage during implementation than we will ever get again. And the reason we have that leverage is because of that vulnerability. And so if we leverage it the right way, and show a prescriptive, proactive, well thought out onboarding and implementation plan so that this customer doesn't just feel like you've done this a million times they know it. And they know exactly what will be required when and who you're going to need from their side. So they can be strategically out ahead of challenges and things like that, as opposed to a reactive firefighting implementation where everything's in emergency. And we're gonna miss this deadline, because the system integration testing isn't done yet. But that couldn't be done until we did the user acceptance and all of that sort of, because of that vulnerability, we have this amazing leverage point that we can use. And when we set it off in the right direction, we can almost not mess it up. And when we set it off in the wrong direction, we can almost never recover. I love your quote about retention starts with implementation, right? The first time we talked, it's stuck in my little chicken brain because it rings so true. That's exactly exactly the point.

Jeff Kushmerek  14:11

Yeah, no, that's it. And you know, never had, I always mess these little things up that way, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. It's all of that, right. And I think one of the reasons we got into this, because I was talking about your startup, you finally convinced this other company to drop the software that they don't that they've been using, that they don't like, and then you can do nothing, but like, you know, drop your keys and then like spill your drink on yourself. And you know, and then you launched into a little bit of that and then talk a little bit more formally in the trough of disillusionment. But I don't know if you can talk about without showing off what's behind you. But yeah,

Aaron Thompson  14:45

this lie like cameras, you know, because I can point to stuff. So imagine we're going to on an X and Y axis, we're going to track level of productivity on the x axis and we're going to track it over time on the Y access. And imagine I'm halfway up the scale, right? I am X amount of productive today without you in my life, what I'm sold is x plus something in terms of productivity from your sales team, they teach and sell me that, yes, your team is going to be this much more productive, or ROI or happiness or engagement or whatever the vision is that I'm sold from your sales team, it's going to be x plus something. And so we automatically think that it's a direct line between where I am today, and what I've been sold. But we all know, that's actually not how learning something new works, right? We go down before we go up, we get less efficient before we get more efficient, because we have to learn new processes and tools and integrations and implementations and people and all this stuff that I just talked about a moment ago. And so we start immediately going down, when we think just inherently that we're going to start immediately going up. And that's the trough of disillusionment, the longer that goes. And the deeper it goes, the more likely I am as a user, or a subject matter expert, or even as an executive sponsor, to just say, forget it, I'm gonna go back and use my spreadsheets, do whatever I was doing before, if it's too deep or too long, now, if we can navigate that change, this is where change management is a big part of customer success, managing that change to pull them out of it so that they can see the trajectory towards the vision of what they were sold, it's starting to come out of the trough, we may not be to the total value realization that we were sold. But we can see it's a possibility. Now the dream is becoming a reality, then we're coming out of that. And we can actually navigate that manage that. And again, sorry, to start that relationship off in the right direction. So trough of disillusionment directly related exponentially to churn and renewal rates, because they can start giving up before you've even had a chance to get them to the vision. Yeah, I've

Jeff Kushmerek  17:02

seen this happen, like when the ETL just doesn't work, right? Like, oh, we have to clean all this data up and put Ryan Lindley like, you know what, exactly, he said, Just forget it. And, you know, I don't think a lot of companies broadcast that as part of like, your kickoff or anything like that, like, here, we're gonna go, it's gonna get a little, it's gonna be a little bit of a dip here, right? We're gonna have to learn some stuff where you have to do stuff, or when they start rolling it out to who's working with a customer, does enterprise fleet management, and it's like, how do we pick up their way that they like to do stuff right now. And we're gonna have to basically retrain them on how to do their jobs. So right back to your change management, like how do you get these people to not throw their hands down and say, this is BS? I'm not gonna call that like, Hey, you will be here. We're just kind of go through a little bit of this here. Absolutely. Yeah, I

Aaron Thompson  17:50

think it's all about expectation management, the better we can, you know, manage those and get out ahead of that, and for the users specifically, and then how we manage those expectations is just through a simple with them, what's in it for me, right? Like, if I'm a user, why should I care? What value am I going to, you know, what's the dream for me? And help me start to see that as a reality as

Jeff Kushmerek  18:12

soon as possible. That's fantastic. Cool. So actually, the next thing we're going to talk about is, so we disagree a little bit on so this year, we'll fund change the focus just a little bit. Let's think about complex enterprise implementations, right, you've got a lot of moving parts, you might even need to get some developers involved, you might need to do some configuration type stuff, who should manage the implementation of the project. So just, I believe in project managers having some part of the project but maybe we can hash this out here, I don't

Aaron Thompson  18:43

think we're necessarily as far off as maybe originally believed. I honestly, I mean, here's how I, here's my take on it. If we know that onboarding and implementation is the most critical stage of the customer lifecycle, and it's where we can really profoundly affect whether there's retention or churn. If the CSM is on the hook for a retention number, meaning for their book of business, they're expected to hit 90 plus percent with gross revenue retention. If that's the role, then they need to be involved. They don't have to be running the project. Perfect. They may not be a project manager, they may not be technical, they may not be an implementation specialist onboarding specialist, but they're the ones who are ultimately responsible for the infinite relationship, the infinitely long customer lifecycle, then they need to get engaged I even argue before sales has even closed it. I like to see the top of the funnel I

Jeff Kushmerek  19:46

believe that the least well, the early maybe around the 75% mark of an enterprise sale, bring them in, you know, everybody, people will listen to me say this 1000 times before you've got somebody in Not on commission. That's a subject matter expert, most likely in this vertical that you're selling to. And they're they're very empathetic, you're just there to because they people pleasers, the classic, you know, hopefully for your CSM, and they can answer questions, they can set it straight, they can expectation manager and walk you through a project plan 100%, like getting them involved in the pre sales versus the classic model of, hey, we just caused this awesome deal. They want to kick off tomorrow. Can you do that? And we're like, Well,

Aaron Thompson  20:32

who are these people? Like? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the other important aspect of this, this concept of bringing customer success out of post sale, and into pre sale, is to do success planning at that stage, so that we're actually selling outcomes and through what experience they want, again, going back to the define, deliver, demonstrate that definition of success needs to happen pre sale, so that we can sell that definition, as opposed to selling a product feature and function, and then having to try to deliver a definition of success. I want to sell the delivery of the definition of a step further, because

Jeff Kushmerek  21:13

one of the things I get asked about all the time is, how do you stop a situation from happening when people will say, well, we're not live yet. It's not everything's turned on, right? But if you did your success planning, like you're talking about, in the beginning, you said, what are the three most important things you want during this implementation phase, and they're like, We want users to be able to do X, use it to be able to do Y and use it to be able to do Z, right. So suddenly, it's not as every feature in the world turned on, or the user is able to do X, Y, and Z. And if they are, tell your finance team, you can start billing for your AR instead of this turning from a three month old mentation into a nine month because maybe something that they thought they were getting was on the roadmap. And he's you know, and they're waiting for that little feature to show up and everything like that.

Aaron Thompson  21:57

Yeah, I was like that, I never want to give all of the value to the customer upfront, right, I want to dole it out over the course of the contract. And I want the CSM to be the one navigating that so that there's always more value to provide. That's, that can be right. I mean, that can be through like disabling parts of the product, which you know, like a perfect example is a Salesforce rollout, you don't want all of Salesforce on day one, it's too overwhelming for your users. I want a very simplified boiled down version. And then I can create more maturity over time, with the help of the CSM. So it adds that trusted advisor becomes a more easily attainable roll for your CSM. And it manages that trough of disillusionment, I just have to learn how to do a couple of things that's much less overwhelming than understanding everything about this huge in your, you know, to your point of these large b2b enterprise implementations. Yeah, no,

Jeff Kushmerek  23:00

that's fantastic. I never thought about that. But I really like that charging the Salesforce one is perfect for that too. Like if you just were like prospecting, like, yes, that's all I need to see. I don't need to see like these 15 other tabs across the top or something like that. That's awesome. But they were good. I think they're here, then you see if I can sum it up. The CSM owns the relationship, as I used to say, which might be the wrong metaphor, they're the quarterback right, they're gonna hand it off to the implementation team, or maybe the hand thrown a pass to the project manager and the project manager has the ball for that particular moment. But you you're the owner, or maybe you're the coach, but you are the one that says the CSM, driving everything and making it happen, versus which I've certainly seen plenty of like, CSM has been like, let us know when it's live. And then we'll transition over to the CSM, which is I'm assuming that's what you wanted to avoid.

Aaron Thompson  23:51

If the CSM is on the hook for retention. Yes, that's the thing, if they have a number that they're expected to hit that they need to be yes, instead of a quarterback, I always use the analogy of a road trip. It's just so crystal clear. So your customers journey is just a road trip. And the tool that we're going to use the car on the road trip is the product or service that they bought. That's the tool we use to get from point A to point B, the customer is the driver of that car. They're the ones using the tool that I as the CSM am the navigator sitting alongside them. And my job is to give you a roadmap of where you are, where you want to go. And all of the various ways to get there and help you make educated decisions just like I would as shootings, they're sitting shotgun in a road trip. So I use that analogy is that's really more of a role. It's not that because a quarterbacks like a project manager, and there is elements to that there is project management depending on the role, but just inherently in terms of a CSM, its relationship to a customer, whether it's enterprise b2b, high touch, or one to many totally tech touch scalable, infinitely scalable ACSM, his role is to be that navigator to helping those champions and sponsors achieve what they, what their definition of success is.

Jeff Kushmerek  25:12

That's great. And I was really hoping you bring a mixtape into this conversation.

Aaron Thompson  25:20

Lot of Boston and Chicago, the other 80s.

Jeff Kushmerek  25:26

Need some journey on your mixtape? Absolutely.

Aaron Thompson  25:29

Don't stop believing

Jeff Kushmerek  25:32

in ourselves. All right. So I think we know we've outlined what the ideal implementation team looks like we've got the journey there. I think that's pretty good. I think that's a great way of navigate through these, eliminating these types of troughs of disillusionment, as we said, right there. But what are we missing? What do we what do we skim over that we didn't cover here for making sure that the customers are going to be fully happy and satisfied and delighted?

Aaron Thompson  25:55

Well, I think the biggest thing is to not try to define anything ourselves from all the way from identifying the first deal of you know, defining what success is, obviously, that needs to be a conversation with the buyer and the the sneezed, probably, okay, so that when most people get that one, right, then the delivery of it, often, oftentimes we get that right, we actually give them what they want, and we deliver that etcetera. Where we maybe and maybe do not do as good of a job is on that demonstration, D when we're doing the demonstration of the value that they've achieved, whether it's specific to the implementation project, or to the overall customer lifecycle. When we do that, we must build that with the champion, so that we can create our, for example, our business review conversation, as opposed to presentation, but a conversation, I want to build that with the champion and make the champion look good in front of the sponsor, so that I can start to create an advocate out of them. And then that's what ultimately leads to account growth through expansion. And then customer success, qualified leads, yeah, when we can actually make them wildly successful, make them, you know, help them get promoted, or be seen as a leader or whatever they want in their careers. We do that and we navigate all of our activity around that those are our goals. And then that's what then leads to our own successes by way of the customer's definition of success.

Jeff Kushmerek  27:25

You may see me get all like pensive there for a second because I was just thinking would call that and everything that was something that you couldn't do. Like let's just go grab lunch, let's just have a, you know, goat, and then let's get out of the tactical day to day deliverable. We this you said X, you said why and just feel like, Hey, we've got a QPR in like two weeks, let's talk about what you want to talk about there. Right, what makes you as the champion look good. And then they will open up after that. And that is something I feel like just a little bit harder in the current sort of scenario. So

Aaron Thompson  28:01

yeah, I mean, there's pros and cons to this world, because we're so used to zoom now that we can actually meet with more people. And we can actually, like I've spoken at meet a lot of meetups during COVID, that I wouldn't have flown to, you know, Houston to go to the Houston meetup and do a one hour talk. But I'm happy to hop on Zoom and talk through it. Yeah. So we have actually, you know, there's actually opportunities with these challenges of COVID. But I think that's the big thing on that demonstration side. Yeah, you nailed it, we need to make them look good in front of what is oftentimes their boss. Yeah. And then we want to make that boss look good as well. Yeah. And when we build it with them, we can actually use the right vernacular, we could use the right signaling the right KPIs, metrics, whatever they're talking about, internally, we now become more of a partner less of a vendor. And you're absolutely right. I want to hammer something. The reactive and tactical is customer support. Customer service. The proactive and strategic is customer success. And that is where the difference lies. I had a post on LinkedIn this week about her last week. Getting a lot of trash. I was surprised, frankly, that the industry kind of was so polarized on that statement. Some people are like, yeah, I totally agree. Thanks for breaking it down chicken brain, awesome. And other people were like, you're an idiot, you know, this is totally wrong, you know. And so it was really, for me, it was kind of a basic sort of how I keep it straight again, in my little chicken array. For other folks. It was more so anyway, that's how I like to see it. And you know, as long as we're being clear upon what we're doing, we can be true to ourselves. Are we really operating in a customer success model? Or do we really operate in a customer support model? That just is called success? Well,

Jeff Kushmerek  29:46

I mean, I can't remember if I jumped in on that one. But I mean, it's such a clear difference. I mean, going back to that pre sales conversation, not too many people can do what the CSS can do, which was understand But the business requirements are for the customer, and then map that back to the functionality that's needed inside your products. And that's a skill that is not customer support support that's broken. Unfortunately, when startups create their CS groups, they're doing all the support tickets as well, too. I, you know, if you're listening and you're doing a, please get some budget and try and work your way out of that, because it's a good place to be. But that's where a lot of the confusion starts. And so I know, it's it's all the same thing. And it's like, it's not, it's not, you know, and then you'll start seeing the churn numbers go up. So yeah, absolutely.

Aaron Thompson  30:35

All right, yeah. Like to say that customer support rolls up underneath customer success. It's part of success, we have to do it. Yeah. But it's not in itself. What's making the customer successful? What's making the customer successful, would be to not have a support problem in the first place. If we didn't, right, like, we didn't want the blog. And so just because you fix the bug is great. I needed you to fix the bug. But it doesn't make me any more. It's not what I was looking to accomplish when I bought your product and service was quick bug fixes. I was looking to accomplish something bigger in terms of a business outcome. No, no, you're right. I am

Jeff Kushmerek  31:09

a firm believer that CS should own. And by the way, this was not this way, six or seven years ago. But see, I should own implementation. See, I should own support. Because all of the whether you call them KPIs or OKRs, or whatever, I know, there's a little bit of a difference. But if the whole organization has that one focus of preventing churn, that's going to be a little bit different than bug number, right? Bug number means customers, if the bug numbers down, or the response times are up, and the customers happier, which means they're going to they appreciate Yes, software gets bugs every once in a while. But we really like how you dealt with the

Aaron Thompson  31:45

situation, you know, and I don't play in your customer satisfaction, etc. But like, make no mistake, there is no added value to your customer just because you hate your initial response to your service level agreement. They didn't want you to have to get back to them about the bug in the first one. We got to keep that clear. Anyway, I digress. No, no, no, that was good. Listen, I

Jeff Kushmerek  32:06

know we I promise. I'll keep it short and sweet. But I've been trying to wrap these up with either what was your COVID hobby? Or like, what are you able to do now that things are getting a little better, hopefully out there. So I'm the bread Baker, not?

Aaron Thompson  32:21

never, I never got into the bread baking. But I did like all of a sudden socially acceptable page ranking. I was thinking that that sounded like a good COVID hobby for me. But in all seriousness, like we early into COVID, we started grabbing the skewed because in Portland, Oregon, we're on pace. We didn't just have COVID We had nightly riots for over 100 nights in a row. And so everything was getting boarded up and burned down and all this stuff. And so my fiance and I would go grab the scooters, we'd throw on masks bring a big giant thing of Clorox wipes. And we would buzz around town looking at all the artwork, whether it was graffiti, or actually artwork placed on like wooden boards that had been there to protect the windows and stuff to Portland's credit, we are very creative and artistic. And there is a lot of culture here for a smaller city, you know, relatively speaking and so we were able to find some really cool artwork and just kind of get out in the city and experience what was happening real time. Wow, that is amazing. So that's it. Yeah, it was a very unique thing to embark upon. But we've got some really cool pictures of some amazing art both commissioned to be there on purpose, as well as maybe just done it night by a local artists. They'll

Jeff Kushmerek  33:39

call it Oh, yeah, those are I love when you drive by some community and in some ways, like, some random mural is popped up. And you know, I'm about 10 minutes north of Boston. So I'm in there, and you see that stuff all the time as well, too. So listen, where can people find out more about you and success hacker and everything else?

Aaron Thompson  33:55

Yeah, actually, the success coaching.co is the best website, we're still trying to wrestle away the.com You can also go to success hacker.com or.co We got both of those. But the hacker website doesn't have as much detail on our training options. That's our parent company. And it also includes consulting and some other like recruiting some other services that we provide. But if you're interested to find me, you can just email me a Ron at success hacker.com And I'll be happy to help. Our mission is to help people get into and thrive within the customer success industry. So if anybody out there thinks I can help in any regard to do that. Email me or find me on LinkedIn. Aaron Thompson, I've got the goofy red pants on. Well, that's

Jeff Kushmerek  34:39

fantastic. Really appreciate you jumping on. And I'll put all that in the show notes as well too. And just hold on one quick second. I'm going to stop the recording and then we'll just wrap up here.

Aaron Thompson  34:48

Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it.