GSD Podcast - An Industry Analyst's Perspective on Customer Success with Bruce Daley

This week we were joined by Bruce Daley of S&P Global 451 Research. Bruce is an industry analyst following revenue generation software companies with a particular interest in Customer Success vendors. He is a long-time student of the software industry and is considered minor nobility in it by some. We talked about how to make a buck in this business, spending a little time making jokes. Some of the questions we discussed were:

Is customer success a good place to build a career? What is the overall market demand for customer success products? Who are some of the winners and losers? What is the hottest subcategory? How do you make a fortune in the space (or at least a living)?

Bruce also shared his billion-dollar business idea only 12 years too late.

Transcript:

Jeff Kushmerek  01:14

All right, first, I think we're good to go. All right, I'm joined here by Bruce Daly of s&p global 451 research, which if people aren't aware was was when I was coming up in the software ranks, that was sort of the was it a boutique, I just felt it was like there was better information coming from the 451 back in the day. So

Bruce Daley  01:37

while we were hot, that's where we're calling for 51. And now, exactly. Now, you know, and now we're part of one of the largest information providers in the world to add to my my dad, one of the largest SAS companies in the world. So if we still are doing the same old work, we always did, except now we've got a breath that niche providers like Gartner and Forrester can't really match. Oh, absolutely,

Jeff Kushmerek  01:59

I was gonna bring something up, but I'm gonna edit that all out afterwards. So anyways, Bruce and I met at the pulse conference. And it was really fascinating because Bruce was out there sort of as an analyst, and I've worked with a lot of analysts, I was at three, first movers, I will say, throughout my career, which is, you know, to get to first mover status, you've got to create the category. And there's a lot of talking with analysts. So I was sort of, always in that sort of really respecting the analyst mindset, because it was always for us, if we're going to make it as a first mover, we need to get these analysts company, as you know, on board, and we always recognize that importance of working with the analysts everything. So I was fascinated when we were introduced when he was at the Rockaway event. Because you're the first analyst I've met that sort of really covering the space and, and just was really fascinated by getting in and hearing some of your insights. Just for people listening, you know, usually we're talking with leaders, we're doers in the actual realm of post sales. But I thought it'd be great to get a different perspective on a where CES is also how it's seen from the outside perspective. And also, Bruce promised to go over some of the things we see getting talked about, and in a way to maybe bring that conversation up, which kind of goes back to the themes of being a little bit more important in your exec staff and your boardroom and having a voice and things like that. So we're gonna we're gonna cover all of those topics, but for but first first for about a minute or so why why should we be listening to you, I know you've got a an incredible background. So I just love you to just tell everybody here a little bit of what you told me when we're in a non brag way, but just some of the industries that you've covered and the sort of what you do on a day in and day out basis? Well,

Bruce Daley  04:02

it really can't be for my good luck because frankly, frankly, I was a pretty ugly stick to my career. But on the other hand, in that career, I've done about everything in software that you can think of. So I started out as a programmer and IBM glasshouse environment. It was a DBA, jump to the sales side and sales, sales, pre sales. I've been a successful entrepreneur, I've done marketing, I've done finance. And so I've got a pretty holistic approach to software that I've developed over the years. And in that time, I've spotted a number of trends going back years and decades, really, that eventually became big, and I think customer success is going to be a big, big, big market. And we've done some research, we went out and we surveyed all the firms that we could identify, which was I think, pretty much all of them at this point in time and we did some ground up projections based on those conversations about what revenue revenues are. And we think this is really one of the fastest growing markets in

Jeff Kushmerek  05:04

software, specifically, software for CES people to get there to do their job, essentially correct. Yeah,

Bruce Daley  05:11

this is specifically software for CES people to do their jobs. So it's companies like Gainsight. And it's companies like churn zero. And it's companies like to tango and its companies like Customer Success box in India, or success carrot or any number of we really tried to talk to every single vendor that we could identify and get a little insight into what their revenues are. And as I said, you know, we're expecting this market to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion for just the software alone, that's not the services Jeff. And starting last year, at a point of about $200 million in sales.

Jeff Kushmerek  05:48

Nice, good i in there, I think there's a flood of new ones coming on, but like they're there, it's nice to see, it's gonna be some of the newer categories. I met, for the first time a bunch of the AI categories and actually just heard really good. You know, for me, every time I hear AI, sharing ice jokes, like that's a chatbot, right, but, but I was just talking with somebody today, that works at a big company that is using one of these AI products. And they're like, it's so easy. It's It's crazy how easy it is and how good it is. But we can talk about that one offline, but but it's really nice to see these also these niche sort of services being provided as well, that can kind of get combined in with some of those larger product products that you mentioned, as well.

Bruce Daley  06:37

Well, I think that demonstrates a healthy growth of the business ecosystem around some of these vendors. And if everybody's making money, that just reinforces the category. And you have to give Gainsight a lot of credit, they really invented this category. They were doing missionary work, and really just a fantastic job on the on the part of Nick Mata and his team.

Jeff Kushmerek  07:00

Absolutely, no, it's a it's in. It was all spreadsheets before that, right. And but there was none of that playbook. And you should go do X. And it's it's hard to think what will actually I know, because some of the work I do like what that looks like if you don't have that stuff, and so you just don't know what to do on a day in and day out basis, you're usually pretty overworked. You know, you might have a customer base of eight for between 20 on the on the low end to hundreds if you're on the sort of low touch end. And you need these additional tools to be able to reach out and talk to customers and provide the value and check in and see how they're doing. Yeah,

Bruce Daley  07:41

well, it's interesting, you mentioned that, Jeff, because my viewpoint is informed by not only conversations that I have with customer success leaders, within s&p and outside, but also I was working for a high tech startup, and I saw the transition take place in it, where it would been a startup that had taken over a decade to start up. And so it had a pretty substantial install base. And what I saw when I was there is that even though the company had a really good grasp of a demand generation, and they really had that down, at the end of the quarter, they would go to the customer service manager and say, We really need to bring this renewal and it's gonna make the difference between the speaker numbers and not. And what I saw is, is that over time he started recruiting a different kind of person is that he really started recruiting someone who had some social skills, and someone who was able to do account management and someone who was interested in the business side, really, he was starting to hire customer success managers without, in fact, titling him that way. And then I also got involved in a project where we went on the back end, and there was a SQL Server database in the sky that was keeping track of all of the times people use the system. And, you know, working with that was very painful. And so I saw based on on that experience, that not only is there a need for customer success, in general, but also a need for a customer success tools that are purpose built for the process. Now as I've gotten more and more into it, I haven't really seen anything that would indicate to me that that is the case that as long as software in particular, and the economy as a whole goes towards subscription business models, it's just gonna become more and more important. And I think, you know, Sandy Lynn over at skill jar, right? She had a great quote where she talked about, well, customer success is responsible for most of the business. It owns the brand, and it owns the relationship with the customer. So why aren't we burning a seat at the table? And I've got some answers for

Jeff Kushmerek  09:52

that, to be honest, Greg, as we chatted about this before, more sanitized version of it, but, but it's true. And I Really idea that from from it, I'm not going to do my weeding the witness, I definitely have a certain perspective on it. But I'd love to see from you coming in from the outside, sort of what you think is causing that because it is it's a big issue amongst all the CS leaders I talked to?

Bruce Daley  10:17

Well, it's pretty simple in my estimation. So customer success managers as a whole, and leaders as a whole, that they tend to have a remarkably consistent personality, they tend to be agreeable as people, they tend to be extroverted. And they tend to be conscientious and highly empathetic, and very empathetic, that's a very good point. That's, that's a that's a constituent component of being a successful customer success manager. What they need to develop and or they need to grow in is the idea of taking responsibility for revenue. And I think, ultimately, end of the day if you have a subscription business model, and let's use Taco Bell as an example, right? Because you've heard about Taco Bell's taco is a service subscription, right? Where for a monthly fee, you get a taco bell taco every day, if you want one, right? And now, I'm not going to question the day, you know, the that diet choice, but certainly, once somebody to Taco Bell is gonna have to manage that process. Once it achieves a scale, like Panera Bread, Panera Bread makes millions of dollars from their coffee club, subscription service, and no reason to think that Taco Bell won't either. But at some point there, see us leaders have to be willing to step up to the plate and say, I will be responsible for this, this chunk of revenue, I will sign my name and blood, which means if we don't bring in the revenue, I get fired. And I think the people that are willing to do that generally are not agreeable. And there, they might be conscientious.

Jeff Kushmerek  12:01

The main argument seems to be consistent that they don't want to ruin their relationship by clouding up with business, which I laugh at, because it's like, you're working for a job they, it's like, it's not the local knitting club. So yeah,

Bruce Daley  12:18

well, a lot of people went into customer success, because they didn't want to be salespeople, right. And that's certainly understandable. But you know, I don't know about you, Jeff, but I tell my kids, if you want to be in business, you have to sell. Now, there are a lot of other things in life you can do that don't involve business. But in business, you're always going to be selling something, if you're a VP of Customer Success, for example, you've got to sell the idea that your function is valuable to the executive team. And how you do that is in my experience is with revenue,

Jeff Kushmerek  12:49

if you're not producing revenue to a company or the cost center,

Bruce Daley  12:54

exactly. And yeah, and, and so that's where the power comes from the power comes from taking responsibility. Because if you say you're going to do something, people can't really stand in your way and prevent you from doing that. Now, the other side of the coin is that there are a lot of factors outside of your control, like the economy, you know, if there are five to seven factors that are going to influence whether you make your number or not, you probably only have control over two or three. So that can be daunting. But I think it's only inevitable, I think it's only a matter of time before vice presidents of sales become customer operations officers or they become Chief Revenue officers. And we're seeing that already in the Silicon Valley, which lately has prompted a lot of business trends that eventually spread throughout the economy. So I think if you were really going to prepare yourself as a CSM leader, probably getting a sales job for a while would be, you know, the training

Jeff Kushmerek  13:55

in I don't know. So Christie was on a few weeks ago. And she was like, go, go have your cell, your head, have your CRO come in and train your team on how to do this. You know, there's definitely a divide in two schools of thought I, there's a many, many, many CSMs, who can't stand the fact that they're doing all of this hard work. And then somebody comes in and puts a contract in front of the customer and gets the credit and gets a nice spending cash on it. Well, I'm doing all that work. And then there's other people like I don't want to deal with that. There's also another model, which I think really works really well is like, Oh, you don't want to get we don't want to take away from your time with all the transactional stuff. So bringing like a renewal manager to deal with procurement and Wiegel and all that fun stuff. But nobody, you know, the in the ideal world, the CSM understands what your business is trying to do. And they map the technology and the features and everything that your product provides back to you. So they're the ones providing all that great advice on how you should be doing it and it should just be a natural conversation. And renewals a very easy if you're doing your job as a CSM of providing the value and showing, I mean providing the the software's value and letting people know where they're getting the value out of it.

Bruce Daley  15:15

Right. But you know, people will really only pay you for two things, they pay you for things they can't do, and they pay you for things that they don't want to do. The RFP has CSM is getting renewal from a customer, everything's going well. And it's going smoothly, it's getting a renewal from a customer where things are going badly and where there's hurt feelings, and there's missed opportunities. And there's undelivered promises. So that's really where the CSM earned their salt, in my estimation, it's turning around counts like that. And if they're going to take revenue responsibility, a huge huge aspect of that as qualifications, they're going to be accounts that you're not going to be able to turn around no matter what. And that might have to do with the economy that might have to do with the culture of the company, that might have to do with factors that are entirely outside of your control. And in that case, you really need to just say, well, we can't save everybody, you have to do kind of an arbitrage and say, you know, this is a customer that's just not going to contribute to revenue, they're not going to renew no matter what we do. So if we have a good relationship with them or not, at least from an economic situation, or standpoint or view, it may not be all that important, we may may want to fire them as customers.

Jeff Kushmerek  16:30

Yeah, some of the smartest companies are down the smartest, smartest boards I've seen, you know, when they come in a certain phase of the company, and they see, you know, all those first batch of customers that signed up, and then suddenly you raise your prices or whatever, you know, it, suddenly you are not the same company that you were two or three years ago, and draw that line and say, these customers are not your ideal clients anymore. And we're not going to count that as churn. So some have a nice email if they want to, you know, or whatever. But, you know, that's one of those examples of companies that just aren't going to renew with you, you know, based on your new model or anything like that. So sort of an aside for what we're talking about. But it's an important thing for companies to do otherwise. They're just trying to, you know, work with companies that they shouldn't be working with, essentially.

Bruce Daley  17:25

Absolutely. And I know you've got some customer service in your background, as am I right. And I think we both know that it's governed by our parental distribution, you know, and that's obviously the 8020 rule that you might have a small percentage of your customers that consume a vast amount of your resources. And, you know, that's just the nature of the world. So sometimes it's better not to have those people on his customers. But once again, I think that's very difficult for many CSM professionals, because as you pointed out earlier, empathy is such an important part of their character.

Jeff Kushmerek  17:56

Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's hard. They, they'll do anything, they'll work so many hours, they just take it. So personally, when there's an accountant that's not going in the right direction and everything. So it's a tough thing. So

Bruce Daley  18:12

I have to say that there are some of the best partiers in any section of technology I've ever I tell you, they certainly beat out DBAs that, you know, AI

Jeff Kushmerek  18:23

experts, you but we all know that title goes to sales, right? So I mean, well, yeah, there's

Bruce Daley  18:28

that's true. You're talking pros.

Jeff Kushmerek  18:33

And amateurs, both clubs that you know, people go down to islands and things like that, or nobody knows what happens. But yeah, it's

Bruce Daley  18:41

there's some great stories coming out of that. I don't think that that's probably appropriate for a family oriented podcast like ours, but to share some of those offline

Jeff Kushmerek  18:50

should be a documentary like the fire festival or something like that. But we'll we'll table this conversation. So that that's sort of one angle. Are there anything else? Because you're you're in the discourse, you see the conversation topics go on? So I will say my my point of view is that on this and I'd love to see your reaction is that there's two things First of all, you don't see developers on LinkedIn saying developers need to develop more and you don't see salespeople saying, Hey, you really need to sell more. In I feel like the a lot of the discourse on on LinkedIn is sort of or an all the communities is like restating some of the basic facts over and over again, versus what's talked about some of the topics that get you your your board level things and your equivalents and things like that, so that you're you can be more valued as a as an organization inside your company.

Bruce Daley  19:48

Well, it's interesting. You said, I have a webinar that I'm doing with highspot in a couple of weeks, and it's about speaking to the C suite because what I find and this is based on my own experience, I've served sure you've had it as well, when you have profit and loss responsibilities, you just really look at the world in a fundamentally different way. Because you've you've, you have the bit energies, you've signed up for that responsibility of keeping the organization going. And so as a consequence, I think there's a big gap between understanding what's important in the C suite and how they think about things and how they approach their jobs. And I see there's a real gap unless you've actually had that opportunity either to interact with the C suite a lot like I have as an analyst, or just as, you know, part of your natural progression your business career. And I would say that that is probably now that you mentioned the most immediate tactical deficiency, that I think a lot of CSM leaders display, and that is that inability really to express what the C suite is looking for. And that's usually in the form of numbers, that what they're usually looking for is how does it impact top line revenue? Or how is this going to lower my expenses so that I improve my profitability, and sometimes, occasionally, the conversation veers into cash flow, but yeah, that's a little unusual. But at the same time, I think that closing that gap is going to have help a lot of ambitious CSM leadership, earn a seat at the table.

Jeff Kushmerek  21:25

So we'll make sure we'll put the link in the show notes and make sure I publish this faster. So we can get that out there.

Bruce Daley  21:31

No, I appreciate that. Thank you,

Jeff Kushmerek  21:32

no one, it's fine, cuz I'm just one of the, like, Do this, don't do that, or eat this, don't eat it that like I see this conversation happening all the time. Now I'm gonna say and then I try and direct them into what you're just basically saying, I see. I have a lot of customers complaining about this feature, what's just be really easy. That's something I'll never understand. For startups. There's no change password feature, oh, my God, when are we gonna have the Change Password feature? When is this going to have those exaggerated and there's obviously probably a bigger feature that's out there. But everybody needs a password and says so. And then that becomes it. And then it's just this just sort of constant sort of like, you know, alerting that's going on, versus saying, we have accumulated, you know, our all of our customers feature requests. And if you looked at our largest customer that everybody looks at, and we do a lot of things to get them renewed, what say there are 200 Arr, we built these features for them to go do but guess what, we found these, you know, 17 customers that are paying us 50k per year, and they're all looking for the Change Password, and that could be at a loss, because we're not going to have that. And I'm no math major, but 17 times 50 is more than 200. So in having that conversation that will get your that feature a lot faster up in the prioritization land, if they if there's a financial impact that you could possibly lose that much AR Because you're missing feature sets?

Bruce Daley  23:07

Well, you raise a really good point, you want to support all your arguments with numbers. And numbers in themselves may not be as convincing as a narrative as a story. Well, you know, we have a lot of clients who want this one customer wants that. If you add them all together, they're more valuable than the one client. That's the narrative. But if you can back that up with hard numbers, because let's face it, there's a lot of narrative in our society. And if you can provide evidence that shows that your narrative is in fact bears at least a nodding relationship with reality, you know, that that's always going to be much more persuasive. Because and by the way, and I'm sure you discovered this in your career, there's a difference between telling somebody something and showing them it? Yes. And it's people are much more convinced when they see something with their own eyes than they do hearing what you say, because to a lot of extent, it's your credibility and the faith people have in you determines whether or not they believe you. So it's

Jeff Kushmerek  24:04

a good point. Yeah, you know, if you're, if it's, you know, if you're gonna raise it to, you know, a high level, then, you know, pull that together and show the data points listed company names have a nice little couple of graphs. I call that argument, like the long tail of feature requests, because it's in that long tail data where a lot of these sorts of things happen and things like that. Good news, as you've probably seen is that, in my view, a segue here is there's a lot of investment into CS ops now to be able to find these types of things. It was I'm trying, I was trying to think of another category. Well, I guess Reb ops carved away on this. Yeah, that's my only smart move on or smart conversation point on that one. But that Yeah.

Bruce Daley  24:48

Well, Jeff, if you think about it, that's a sign of the market maturing. Because if companies are depending on their CFO efforts to keep the company in business, that's when they start to invest in operations when they say We really have to have this running on a periodic basis, because we're relying on it for reporting or, you know, just to keep the lights on and the doors open. So that's, that's another that's a good data point for me, just to understand that, as ces ops become more important than obviously, that's just a reflection of how important CES is. Yeah, I know, it's

Jeff Kushmerek  25:23

really blowing up. There's a quote that I always cite from Nick actually, who was, you know, who, you know, I think it's, if I could paraphrase. You know, all these Yes. All these new CEOs are asking me what the first hire should be in CES. And I always tell them, CSR. Now, that's not my answer. But, you know, you definitely do need it at a certain point in time and everything. So it's just not the first hire. I think that anyways, yeah, I think your first

Bruce Daley  25:52

hire is a consultant, somebody who can help you plan out your strategy and lay out here, you know, here's the path you need to follow. You need someone who's who, you know, has done it before. So that would be

Jeff Kushmerek  26:04

the five cat. But there are many good consultants out there that could that could, that could find that for you. But it is there is something to be said about setting up an organization correctly for the first time and then bring other people to do that. But that's that, not to belabor that point. So what are some of these other trends that you're seeing as you're sort of diving deeper into this market, or just things that like you're already the pleasantly surprised or really made the eyebrows raise?

Bruce Daley  26:28

Well, I'd have to say that there is a growing recognition that of all the steps in the customer success journey, probably onboarding is the most important one. And as consequently, there's been a whole new category of companies that have been created within the CES space that focus specifically on onboarding. And it seems to me that the classic Customer Success vendor starts with renewals and works backwards, whereas the this new generation of onboard orders, start with the the moment the sales made and then move forward. And they're meeting somewhere in the middle. Now, there's obviously some competition going on. Because a lot of the CES vendors also have onboarding features to their products. At the same time, it's it's an important enough function that it's created its own category, at least temporarily.

Jeff Kushmerek  27:20

No, absolutely. You know, I'm a big fan of all of them, they, they made my life easier if they're there in practice, you know, tagline that I always say is retention starts in implementation. And that's, it's super important, because you go through all the, you know, everybody loves the first date, and then you go to contract and everything. And then if you show up with implementation, and I see this with, like, some of the companies I work with, and then they've hired a vendor to install, like their Zen Desk or something like that, you show up terrible process, charging you for every meeting, I just all these practices that I just like, oh my god, I can't believe this is happening. And then suddenly, I'm like, I would never, ever, ever recommend that company to anybody. And just because they had a terrible onboarding experience, or implementation, I stick with implementation, because onboarding can get confusing, because people then talk about like, do you mean when employees onboard? So I'm like, no, no implementation? It's very, yeah, but very meat and potatoes for me, but it's just, I'm glad it's I guess it's what you're saying is proving your point that it's a measure of success that an industry is moving forward, when you start getting these sub niches going on. And onboarding slash implementation software is definitely one that that you're seeing, I can think of five distinct vendors right now. And, you know, with, you know, ranging from very easy to, you know, very complicated things that you can do with their stuff. So, there's definitely a big movement there in the software. So,

Bruce Daley  28:55

well, I'd like your nomenclature for implementation, I would have to say, throughout my career, in software, at every single job I've had, whether it's been a programmer or salesperson or a consultant, its implementation has always been the number one problem because I would say it's improved over time. But I would say most software implementations don't go successfully and the ones that are really successful are pretty rare. And and a lot of them fail outright. And if you're going to be depending on a customer relationship, and they can't implement the product that's worse than you know that they've never heard of you.

Jeff Kushmerek  29:33

It's terrible. Yeah. You see so many times you know, the salesperson loses a deal to event to a competitor, and then three weeks later they send out an email like hey, how's it going with x y&z and they're like terrible implementation you have to deal if you can get us kickoff meeting this week. So

Bruce Daley  29:54

much. What what's the difference between a used car salesman and a software sale Let's

Jeff Kushmerek  30:02

plaid jackets maybe?

Bruce Daley  30:03

No, they used car salesman knows when he's lying.

Jeff Kushmerek  30:10

That is so true. It wasn't I lost I love salespeople. You know,

Bruce Daley  30:14

me too. I was one

Jeff Kushmerek  30:18

where we everybody sells right so but no, it's it's it's it's super important. I talked about all the times though everybody listen to this podcast here's you tell about it and you know it's it's getting a lot of basic things correct, right and just having a putting it's actually very if you do it right that might be pretty close to old fashioned waterfall software rollout where you do the same repeatable tasks over and over and over again. You know, here's our 30 day. So my saying here is that 9080 to 90%. If you're you know, past series A and Series B, not a 89% of your software rollouts, your implementations should be pretty following the same pattern. Otherwise, you're pretty white labeled.

Bruce Daley  31:06

I think it's like Tolstoy said about happy families, All happy families are alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. And I think that same thing is true of the implementations. All successful implementations are alike, right? Yeah, it's the and the unsuccessful ones that are unsuccessful for different reasons. Oh, we didn't get executive sponsorship, oh, we got resistance from the end users. Oh, we didn't have enough budget to be able to scope it correctly. We had performance issues, we, you know, we didn't buy the right software. I mean, everybody has a reason for why the implementation fails. So

Jeff Kushmerek  31:40

I will say on that note, you can fix everything from when the deal signs moving forward, tightening up your processes, making sure you're got the right project plan using the software, the alerts are going out. You've set up the cadence meetings and the kickoffs. But if that deal was signed into the wrong circumstances, you're screwed. Just 1%. Right? You said that thing about the executive sponsor, if you can't get them involved, not you can't get you know, you know, if they're kicking something down to their their team and say, make sure this works and they're not invested in it and things like that, then yeah, you're you're screwed. You're not going to your best processes can't get through bad relationships, usually. So yeah,

Bruce Daley  32:19

ya know, we've all lived it. I'm sure that you've got the scars, I've got the scars to prove it. So at one point in my career was a smokejumper. So they would bring me in for and this is like, maybe I was the ultimate CSM. Maybe it was like the Arnold Schwarzenegger, obviously. I'm a smokejumper. Here's this, this, this project gets out of control. The clients really angry, you know, oh, well, we're gonna take you and we're gonna parachute you in. And you're I wasn't

Jeff Kushmerek  32:45

me. I did that for like, seven years. Yeah. As I say, I'm you know, I'm only 35. I just look like this. So yeah, from from that particular job. So,

Bruce Daley  32:55

exactly. It's like dog years, right, exactly.

Jeff Kushmerek  33:00

So So any other sort of insights that you think is helpful for CS leaders and doers that are listening right now?

Bruce Daley  33:09

I would say that the trend is inevitable. And consequently, if you ask me where the best place to start your career in software would be I would say it would be as a CSM. I think the future is just really bright and really broad for the people in that. Now. It's a difficult job. And there's a lot of frustrations day to day, organizations don't change as fast as technology. So it's going to have its its share of frustrations. But I think in the long run, this is where the next generation of CEOs is going to come from that I think in a number of years times, you're gonna see people who are running entire organizations who got their start CSMs. And so I would say stick with it and be patient. And as we can end with this, as Marc Benioff said, You underestimate what you do in a year, but you underestimate what you do in 10 years actually said you. He said You overestimate what you can do in a year and you underestimate what you can do in 10 years.

Jeff Kushmerek  34:10

Yeah, that's a that's a way of looking at it that that is correct. Well, let's just let's wrap on a fun note. Winter's coming, because this is my previous pandemic question. What's your what's your big winter initiative that doesn't involve looking at software companies and CS landscapes?

Bruce Daley  34:25

I'll be teaching skiing at Taos, New Mexico, so Oh my god. Wow. Which is one of the best skiers in North America. So I'm really psyched about that. I will be there on the slopes helping people learn to be better skiers.

Jeff Kushmerek  34:40

Yeah, I've never skied.

Bruce Daley  34:41

Hey, you're talking the right guy.

Jeff Kushmerek  34:45

You don't want me falling over on skis. It's just not a good thing. So

Bruce Daley  34:49

well, that's your responsibility where we talk about taking responsibility. I don't take any responsibility for that.

Jeff Kushmerek  34:54

I'll do I'll hold on to a little tow rope that my daughter's all learned from I think that's about the I Will cross country skiing. But you know, is there's a certain equilibrium situation going on that I don't want to mess with the knees and the backbone. It's just and since I'm an old man,

Bruce Daley  35:11

I'll I'll get you up and down the slopes. I promise in return for being a guest on your podcast again, and I'd be honored. Wow.

Jeff Kushmerek  35:21

Now me I get all the cool snow gear I'm looking at. That'd be amazing. Yeah, that'd be great. Well, so hold on one minute. Well, thank you so much. We'll put a link to your LinkedIn and a link to your speech as a speech for year round webinar that's coming up on talking to the board level and we'll go from there. We get the right title in there and everything. So just hold on one second. We'll wrap up and thanks again.

Bruce Daley  35:46

Thank you for having me.