GSD Podcast -Slack as a Customer Retention Tool with Mike Molinet of Branch

Jeff is joined by Mike Molinet of Branch. Mike had written this article on how Branch uses Slack to Retain and Grow $100k+ accounts. This was such a different perspective that we needed to get Mike on the podcast to explain. Listen has Mike describes:

 - How Branch uses Channels to keep engagement high with Branch's power users and Champions

- Expectation management and guardrails needed to prevent CSM burnout with customers actively engaging with Slack

- Building organic communities with customers using Slack

- Sending Product updates and marketing to customers in Slack

- Tiering customers for level of slack engagement

- Using Slack engagement analytics to be leading indicators of churn and renewal. 

And a ton more! 

You can listen to this podcast here

Here is the transcript:

Mike Molinet

Jeff: [00:00:00] Oh, so I'm gonna, I just hit record, but I'm still laughing from that previous conversation, so, which is fine. We're gonna roll right into it. I'm here with Mike Monet, who is the co-founder and COO of Branch. So Mike actually wrote this awesome article for a company I think that you're advising or, or, or whatnot, which we'll get into, which, and if anybody has, has done themselves a disservice and actually listened to more than one of these podcasts, they know that I say, I like to be proven wrong.

Every once in a while cause it proves that this is why we talk. We learn things from things, right. And so I have been on a war path for years about Slack usage in the CS world and I was reading Mike's article and I was like, No, this all makes sense. I'm wrong. . I was so wrong about this. So I'm gonna link out to the article so everybody can read it and pull it up while they're listening or whatnot.

But before we do that, Mike, talk a little bit about what you're doing at Branch [00:01:00] and and and then we can get into this, this really cool stuff that all around Slack and using Slack to improve re. So, 

Mike: yeah. Perfect. Well first of all, Jeff, thanks for having me on. Excited to hopefully persuade you that slack can be really powerful.

Jeff: You got me. I swear to God, I, I was inside a I was doing a customer journey today and there was a specific part post launch where it says, Shut down Slack and I remove that box as part of the process. 

Mike: Ah, , I, I talk to a lot of CSMs on a regular basis at various companies and I think it's becoming more and more popular, but yeah.

Lemme introduce myself. So I'm Mike. I am co-founder of Branch. Branch is a mobile linking platform and mobile measurement platform for mobile apps, basically. Yep. So we're a technology that goes into apps You know, basically large apps like Uber and Spotify to help them work better and link better.

Yep. And we are based in Palo Alto, California. We're about 550 [00:02:00] employees. We have a few thousand customers, including, call it maybe like 500 enterprise customers, of which about 300 or so. 

So. Yeah, yeah. No, so, so we, we service some of our. Largest and healthiest accounts on Slack. We've been actually heavy Slack users from the beginning, ever since 2014, and we were using Slack for customers before things like shared channels and Slack Connect even existed, geez, back to 1516.

We would invite as guests. People at a customer, or even a prospect to our Slack workspace. Yep. Or sometimes we'd go join their workspace and then we, at one point we had something like 3000 guests in our Slack instance. Wow. Between so many people that were in these channels. And then Slack rolled out shared channels, beta, and we got into the beta.

We were one of the first people using it, and we've, we've loved it ever since. We've seen a lot of value from it. So definitely a different, different way of engaging with customers, which we'll talk 

Jeff: about a little bit too. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And so in my, [00:03:00] I love using Slack and I, I've been using a tool like that.

I mean, I'm talking like aim pop up back in the day, like like so definitely know the power, but I've really just kept it for projects and implementation specific. And I think we were talking a little bit before we got on, I tell sales people. Yeah. Sign that deal. We're gonna get connected to you on Slack.

We're gonna have a kickoff call, we're gonna go. And, and it definitely builds that engagement. But I typically have then said, okay, post-implementation, like, shut it down. Like, and, because the classic joke that I always say is that Slack's great for Cs if you like working nights and weekends. But so I'd love to hear.

 Some of these early success stories and how they kind of then folded into the sort of slack as a strategy for retention? 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the benefits that you see during onboarding and implementation are the benefits that do extend to the various different life cycle stages of a customer.

So a [00:04:00] lot of those benefits that people, when they use Slack with customers will tend to see are that the slack, the customer is much more. You have direct access to them. You can even get responses from them much more quickly usually. Cause you know, during a sales process, even during an implementation and even during regular success stage, you still want to engage with and get responses from your customer.

 And I've been saying and touting for the last couple years that our customers are working in Slack. We need to meet our customers where they. And that philosophy of don't make them go somewhere else if they don't wanna work somewhere else. Right. Has kind of been something that we've seen really resonate and has, has provided a lot of benefit.

 So the benefits that really tie from. The same thing that you might see in, in the implementation phase are that they're much more engaged. You can get it, they're much more engaged. You have faster turnarounds, faster responses. Mm-hmm. which I think is important when you're interacting with customers.

I think we all see kinda that, that flow where you might be in something, you might have an issue or [00:05:00] question or need a response, you ask it. But if you don't get a response in, you know, a short time, yeah. Then you move on to something else, and sometimes getting that person back to that workflow. Maybe implementing Rusty K in our cases or you know, rolling out their first campaign or whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do.

If they've moved on and we're all very busy, constant distractions, lots to do, it's hard to get them back to that, that place. So if you can have more response, a faster response, and actually answer what they're trying to do in real time. Yep. You. Help enable them to actually ultimately do the thing that you want them to do, which is roll out your product, use your product, and grow so that then you can upsell and cross that.

Jeff: Oh, absolutely. It's just, I'm just seeing Ttv just going down and down and down, just being able to, to do that. I, one note on that is that I've typically tried to push decision making. Into like a tool. I mean, I used to do this back in the base camp days and everything, and [00:06:00] especially with Slack, first of all, usually after like 30 days everything's gone and stuff like that.

But if it's a decision, like I'm trying to think of an easy one, but like hey, should we enable this configuration setting on this property or something like that, I typically will try and get. So most of my customers use like a tool like Baton or Rocket Lane or whatever because, and then there you've got a variety of tasks.

And then you can, in that task say, do we have a decision on this? And then it'll be documented there because I've just lived the life of people like, who said that we should be enabling that property on this? And then you're like, wait, was it an email or a Slack? So I do drive. Decision making towards that.

But I do like the conversational aspect on, I'm not sure if you have a perspective on on that, based on, 

Mike: I don't have a strong perspective on the decision making piece. I think every company uses a different tool or tracks it in different ways. Yeah. What I have started to see is, especially with. Savvy companies or fast moving companies, they will come up with some sort of schema that they'll use in [00:07:00] Slack.

There's one very large company that we work with that they're very good at it, and they have certain schema. So you know, sometimes they'll start a, if it's a request or a question, they'll start with request or question. If it's a decision, they'll start with decision or topic. For discussion. And so they start the message with that and then usually the conversation, 

Jeff: I like that.

So it's like they have their own like Slack. What ontology, I'm trying to think 

of 

Mike: like the Correct. Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's like a Slack ontology and actually we've started doing that more at branch based on what we learn from this customer. And we with this customer, we don't just have one shared channel.

We actually have. At least four. I think it's five shared channels with them because they're big enough that they have different teams interacting with our different teams in a different way. So there's a centralized channel and different channels, but we learned that from them. Having that ontology, I think it can be pretty effective if that works for you.

But if not, then you can take that. You can actually it somewhere else as well. But the nice thing about Slack is that it is a searchable log, and that's the acronym, right? Searchable log about conversation and knowledge, right? And so it's a searchable log. And so somebody that maybe [00:08:00] comes into the conversation six months later or a year later, they can go back and search if they're looking for something, what was that thing we decided?

And if you marked it as with your ontology decision, oh, that's a great way to get, and you can actually find that 

Jeff: thing. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have bots driven off of that as well? Like you see the decision coming in? I put bots to maybe discuss those a little earlier, but we can get into it now. But like because what I've seen those things as being effective is being like, oh, you know, a question was asked, do you wanna drive them to Zendesk?

Or something like 

Mike: that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. That's what, that's what Thena does. And Athena's the, that's right. I was, I was the guest guest blog post on so we use them and that's the primary one. That we use. And we can talk about that a little bit later in terms of how they do that. But you know, in terms of detecting requests and things like that and pushing it to other places, whether it be, you know, Salesforce, whether it be Gainsight or Zenes or anything like that.

So there's a lot of lot of power that you can do there, and I think that's what we're starting to see. Right. And that was. That was part of what I've been pushing at Branch and part of actually why Athena guys are building what they're building, [00:09:00] which is if you meet your customers where they work and you they're in Slack and you're also in Slack, that's, that's really amazing.

Right? But it does create challenges. Creates challenges around, we can talk about rules of engagement later. In terms of, Volume, but it also creates challenges around how does this connect with the other thing. Cause you don't wanna go into other dashboards all the time, right? And so you have to be smart about the way in which those things are utilized and how they're connected with other things, which is where Athena ends up coming in, connecting to the other places.

So you can stay where you work, the customer can stay where they work. But you don't need to worry about going through a different dashboard. Cause I think we're, we all are starting to suffer with the rise of SaaS applications from dashboard fatigue. You don't need that another dashboard necessarily to check.

Correct. So if you can do a lot of these things, track requests, manage alerts, submit tickets. Do market automation and do it within the place that you already are Slack. It can be really powerful and I think that's what we're starting to see, the rise of Slack being that kinda central place where work actually happens.

Yeah. And email kind of degrading over [00:10:00] time as the place where, you know, that's where your marketing newsletters and junk mail goes and maybe the you know, the occasional spam message that didn't get filtered out and. Maybe 10% work related messaging is, is what I'm seeing in what I, as, as I've looked through kind of my email inbox and see how, what volume is actually business related versus other 

Jeff: stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So let's talk about some of those rules of engagement, specifically, let's say implementation. Like, I, I don't like to have too many rules of engagement in there. It's like you want that ttv, you know, it's okay. People are slacking back and forth on a variety of different things, but let's say customers gone alive, and that's where I typically pull the plug out before.

How do you make sure that the CSM isn't just buried in losing track of things and responding at late points of the night in the weekend and things like 

Mike: that? Yeah, I, I think there's a number of different things that you can do. I think first and foremost, setting the expectations. The customer and then repeating those as needed on an ongoing basis.

So our CSMs have [00:11:00] done a really effective job at being able to say, okay, this is how we're gonna use the channel. This is what, you know, how you should submit certain requests. And I think that can be really effective at the point in time in which you remind people. Yeah. But you also have to kinda keep people updated.

One of the things I'm working with Dina on on their product development roadmap is being able to say when a new person joins a channel. Cause constantly people are getting out into channels post a welcome message, and in that welcome message automated just for that person, tell them, here's a summary of what the company or the Slack channel's about.

Here's a summary of how you use the Slack channel. Here's some rules and engagements. Oh, and by the way, here suggested links. And then also Slack has this new bookmark function. I dunno if you've noticed it, but at the top, in addition to used to just be able pins. Yeah. But now you can do book bookmarks.

Those bookmarks link to things like external. Documentation, internal documentation, whatever. And so having a set of five different bookmarks up there visible with emojis I've seen to be really effective, where one might be, [00:12:00] you know, your csm and then it's a link to the, you know, it's just the person's name.

One might be playbook, one might be, you know, submit a, submit a ticket. You can do all sorts of things. And if you put five of the most commonly used things up there in bookmarks, that can also be really effective. But going back to the rules of engage. Yeah, yeah, 

Jeff: it's really, I do, I know that I should also now, No, neither of us work for Slack

We just, 

Mike: yeah, yeah, yeah. Just for Slack power users. And so, so going back to the rules of engagement, first and foremost is updating the customer and then I, as much as possible, Letting them know or reminding them. And the more you can automate that, whether it's something like Thena or something else you're able to keep people as they get added to the channel, updated, but you still have to remind people.

And so sometimes you have to tell them real time. This seems like more of. A request, I'm gonna create it into a ticket. And you can do that with something like Thena to turn into an actual ticket, have it sent to Zen Desk or whatever you might 

Jeff: use. So if that's the case, cause then we [00:13:00] don't have to, cause I have a situation with a customer where it's like, it's like a using a stick and carrot approach, which is like, oh, we might have to take away Slack if you don't start using Zen Desk for your support tickets.

But this would take kind of take care of that problem cuz it would just. Auto I'm viewing Thena and again, just not trying it's all new to me. But it sounds like they're almost like a Zapier for Slack as much, so like it's connecting tools together to, to do proper business workflows and things 

Mike: like that.

Yeah. And helping manage your customers inside of Slack. Yeah, and even prospects too, right? But yeah, the, I think you have to look at the incentive, right? Like, why isn't somebody doing that thing that you want them to, if you have to keep reminding them, Hey, go to this help portal, or, Go to your email and send the email to support at, yeah, but they're not doing it on a recurring basis.

That's because they're not incentivized and you can use the stick approach. But using sticks with customers isn't necessarily always the best approach. Yeah. It's not the best , so it's more about how can you make their lives [00:14:00] easier rather than trying to make your life easier. Because I think if you can make their life easier and have something that makes your life easier in the meantime or at the same time, That's, that's beautiful, right?

That's a win-win. So I'm a big believer of why, like understanding the incentives of why the customer might be doing something or not doing something that you want, and then figuring out how can you make it easier for them to ultimately get what they want without disrupting your workflow as well.

And that's where I think some of these tools can really, really come in. 

Jeff: I also wanna clarify that the stick approach is for the CSM is not for the customer . So like I don't really do the stick approach for customers, but for CSMs it's kind of like, Hey, listen, like you know, but no, I appreciate that.

That's a good distinction. So, 

Mike: yeah. . Yeah. And one of the changes that we made too, cause we, we had a period where we would, during the implementation phase, similarly, we were worried about the rules of engagement and we were worried about the customers gonna, you know, maybe abuse, having a Slack channel and having that direct access, which is always a concern.

And so I remember one time we had a new customer, we onboarded them [00:15:00] over 60 days. They had 115 employee. In our Slack channel. Oh my God. And we closed and we closed it. Yeah. After the, it was like, cool, you're live. Congratulations. Close Slack channel. And my reaction was, wow, this is like a heavily engaged customer, constant conversation all day long, large name brand, and they have 115 people in our Slack.

It's just chatting 

Jeff: about your product. Like it's what 

Mike: an amazing channel to have, right? Yep. And, and as soon as you shut that down, where does it all go? All those people get kicked. They no longer have access. And then also now everything's being done on email, but it's being done in more silos. So instead of a 15 people seeing that, you might have five people seeing the conversation going back and forth.

But that's it. And people tend to forget. And I think being top of mind for customers on a regular basis is one of the most important things. Cause if you're, if you, if they know and see and hear, there's that psychological bias of just remembering, oh yeah, branch, oh, we use branch, really have, for example.

Right. Would you, would 

Jeff: you go so far as to say that that's [00:16:00] a community? 

Mike: I, I frankly. I think so. So I think so. It's a, it's, it's a, it's a small community. It's a narrow community. But yeah, it's absolutely, but let's, 

Jeff: let's take that another, you know, I, hundred percent I think it's, we the witness here, but I think it's a community.

And, and, and you would need to roll out a different tool. Here's our community tool. Please go there. These are all the things that, as I said, made me sit around and question life decisions for a while cuz I'm like, oh my God, , why was I doing this? I was really trying to protect csm. But this is like you've created a community, organic, organically created a community.

Mike: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . That's amazing. And I, you see the, the immense benefits that come from that, right? And the, the benefits that I see, and I, I'm a big believer that your existing revenue is five times more valuable than, than a new dollar of revenue because it's cheaper to, to service and maintain those people become.

Your references and referrals. Oh, absolutely. People to new companies and [00:17:00] bring you with them. And so if you give 'em a really good experience that it's not only that existing revenue, which is much more profitable than your first year of revenue, but it's also that they then bring you, and actually when you look at the number of new business deals that come in and where those leads are coming from, a vast majority of them to use this stuff over there.

Yeah, they're inbound. It's like, oh, I used to use it over there. It was amazing. We had, so if you deliver that amazing experience, it has effects all the way back to presales and not to mention upsells and cross sells with that existing customer. Yeah. And so that's why I believe that delighting through delivering an amazing customer experience, but doing it efficiently and effectively is critically important and doing it in a way that the customer likes and is used to working rather than trying to force them into some something else.

I was reading another. Poster. It was a study recently and I was talking about, you know, customer, customer happiness and satisfaction, renewal rates and all that sort of stuff, and the vast majority of customers that churn, basically they have an issue where they're unsatisfied. But they're not actually submitting [00:18:00] either feedback or request.

They're just kind of living silently in that pain. Yeah. Until they churn. Like a bad marriage. Sorry, like a bad marriage. And you don't realize that. You might think. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, the problem is churn is, Very much a lagging indicator. It's the, the la like the, the most laggy of lagging indicators because by the time it happens, there's nothing you can do.

Right. And, 

Jeff: and we, we've seen those examples I think we talked about last time of, of people going in pitching a big upsell like, oh, we're gonna, You know, and next thing you know, they're like, actually we've replaced you. You're like, oh my God, . Wow. Talking about the lagging indicator . 

Mike: Yeah. And that's where's where I think delightful and amazing customer experience is good, but also making it easy for them to engage.

Cause if there's a friction point, if they're like, oh, I like in Slack, but they killed the Slack channel, I have to send them an email. If I have an issue, ah, whatever, I'll just kinda live with the pain. But if you make it easy, then you can, you can get those signals. And those signals can be positive, they can be negative, but it doesn't matter because those are leading indicator.

[00:19:00] On the health and, and sentiment of that account. And so you can use that as ways to detect. Theirs a something here, for example, you might see an increase in messages or you might see a decrease in messages happening in Slack. Those leading indicators can ultimately inform whether or not, oh, there might be an issue here.

Right. And that's one of the things that on their analytics side we're starting to test as well, is. To say, oh, the request and conversations are actually going down over time. And then you can go look, is that good? Is that bad? It might be good. It might be cause they're happy and they're actually the product.

Well, or it might be cause they're disengaging. One of the other things that I kinda an eye on too is, are people starting to lead the Slack channel on an increased frequency, right? If you have customer users in there and you're starting to see people drop off, that might be a sign that. Maybe disengaging and that disengagement is also a leading indicator so you can start to pick up all these signals.

Jeff: Are you pulling that well until like data ops and somebody's analyzing that aspect? 

Mike: No, we're, we're not pulling it into any other system other than right now it's, you [00:20:00] know, subjective and keeping, keeping a manual eye on it. But even that, at that rate, you're still able to do its of customer channels and I'm able to kinda start to see some of that sentiment and that's where also starting to automate some of that like, Hey, we're detect.

Increased dropage, increased people leaving, et cetera, right? Yeah. So there's more things again that you can start to automate these things rather, rather than having to rely on, on the manual aspect of it. But they can be really powerful in detecting these things in like sentiments. Yeah. As before suddenly something before your customer turns.

And then on the positive side, things like upsells and cross sells. If they're more highly engaged and they use your product better, they're prob, you're probably gonna lead maybe to a volume upsell, right? They're gonna be more successful with your product. But also that's when you can start to see cross sells products and you can see people say, Hey, you know, I'm seeing in this way.

We have this product line that might be applicable for you. Or you can start sending marketing messages when you release a new product, is something that we did recently. We released a new paid product, sent a message to all of our Slack channel. The [00:21:00] response there was amazing. Cause people can, they can engage, they can say, oh, this is interesting, Mike, can I learn more about this?

Mike, can we set up a demo? Versus, like the email marketing. That tends to happen a lot of times. It's, first of all, it goes to fewer people, but an email marketing and there's not really much they can do. Right. You might have a cta It's, 

Jeff: it's like a broadcast. Yeah. It's an, it's a broadcast. Here's, here's a newspaper.

Go read it. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, okay, click here to read the blog post. And you're like, okay. That sounds. But you're not having an active conversation. It's very asynchronous. Yeah. And that's not a good way to kind get people when they're interested in that moment. Again, that short attention span of you've got them for 10 seconds, for five minutes, whatever it is.

Yeah. Can you capture them then? Because if not, they've moved on something 

Jeff: else. Oh, it's right. It's like the, it's like the, it's like the drift model, right? Like, oh, you're on the website, boom. Like talk to somebody, right. Like Exactly. Yeah. What's actually a sense of you brought up email marketing you know, more.

Big old year of learning 2022. I learned that customers probably right around your size, maybe right around that [00:22:00] 500 level series C I'm not sure what you're at in terms of that, but like I've now seen customer marketing report to the cco, which I love if you do it right. Mm, do actually, we did something similar virgin back in the day when we so we basically needed it's kinda like a B to c, B to C type of play.

You, you sign on a company and then you need to get their users engaged. So who's better to get the users engaged? Not regular marketing, customer marketing, which comes out of the, you know, cause you're trying to drive those value conversations and everything. So I, I've definitely seen a customer marketing Organization or, or, you know, group reporting to the cco.

So I, I'm, I'm seeing some, you know, very dim light bulb going off above my head about tying in this customer marketing and the Slack messaging going out about things like that. And then you, me and you had mentioned, started mentioning some of that. So I'd love to go down 

Mike: that road a little bit. Yeah, I love the [00:23:00] concept of customer marketing reporting into a cco.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where somebody reports, as long as you have to write kinda incentives and reporting, et cetera. But I love that because what it really does is aligns the CCO saying, I, they want ultimate success of their customers and their department, and they can make sure that the marketing that's going out to their customers is well aligned with that.

 So a branch with basical. Customer success and sales rolling up through me. One of the things that we started doing was sending out marketing newsletters in our slack channels, customer shared Slack channels. Yep. And so, and originally I, I built this. Complex script to be able to do it. It's, it was very, very heavy weight, you know, took a couple hours to do every time.

We're trying to send 'em every two weeks. Ok. This is something where The's built marketing automation to be able to do this. But lemme kind explain the purpose and the reason why I saw so much value from it. Why I, you know, spent a weekend trying to build this to be able to get it done. Going back to email, email marketing [00:24:00] newsletters.

We, and we spent 30 years, 20 years getting email marketing newsletter. Everyone is bombarded with them. You have to send email marketing newsletters. But there's a lot of people that don't open them. They put 'em on, you know, spam or digest, or they hide them, they auto folder them, whatever. And also you have to signed up for an email newsletter.

And I did a check with one of our channels and I looked at the customer and I said, how many of the customers users are signed up for our email newsletter? It was like, Yep. How many customer users are in our shared Slack channel? It was like 200. Wow. It was 10 x. The number of people. And so we, when we send a Slack marketing newsletter, and this could be a product update, it could be events that are coming up.

It could be content that was released recently, blog post, whatever. Right? When we send these, all 200 of those people are seeing that because in a shared Slack channel, they're opening that Slack channel. Cause there's a notification. Nobody wants notifications and they're seeing it now, how heavily they engage might.

but. They're seeing it and seeing that content, having much broader [00:25:00] visibility can be really amazing. One of the things that working on is being able to actually segment it, right? Because if you have events coming up in North America, you don't wanna send that necessarily to all of your European customers or your AAP customers.

And so being able to segment, that's kinda an advanced feature, but the beauty of that is you get much broader visibility. It's more of a conversation. It's easier to act. And you can make it so basically your CSMs don't need to do anything, or they can, you know, segment it. So it goes beyond even marketing newsletters, right?

Because you can start doing things like, oh, here's a blog post that we just released, right? And what typically happens is you say, Hey csm, can you share this with your customers? And they're like, put this in email. Fire up Marketo, and fire up Marketo. And now instead you can basically say, okay, cool, I'm gonna send this to all of my customer.

And it's gonna come across as a message and it's gonna look really good. And it's interesting cause the most 

Jeff: engaged users are the ones that are in the Slack channel. So it's like, oh well we've got three champions. Okay. But yeah. But then you've got all these other users 

Mike: that are [00:26:00] in there. Yeah. Yeah.

That's great. Yeah, and I think kinda going, talking about that real briefly in terms of all the users that are in there, I think what I found. Each team in each department is operating their own applications. Right. On the vendor side, so on like on our side, sales is operating in Salesforce, CS is operating in gain site.

Yeah. Engineering and product. They're operating in other tools. Our billing team is operating in another tool. Renewals team is operating in another tool. Right. Everybody's in their own tools. But Slack is a centralized place in the common software where everyone is. And so suddenly when you have an entire account team, you have the csm, the solutions engineer, the ae, the AE manager, maybe the renewals person, all in that shared Slack channel.

Everyone has common context. Everyone has increased visibility. Everyone can see all of. And interact with the customer in different ways. So when the customer has a question or an issue or request [00:27:00] and your people can jump on it based on who it is and what the request is for, that's amazing. Versus everyone kinda 

Jeff: internal Slack channels versus external.

Mike: We do both. Yeah. So basically with the customer we'll have, you know, external branch and the customer name. And then internally we'll have an internal channel and we, sometimes we'll coordinate on the internal channel. Sometimes we'll coordinate on the external channel within a thread. The customer has a request and so we'll do both.

It's really amazing cause then you put notes as well and you get those increased visibility notes versus before what would happen an AE or a c. Go into Salesforce, type up their notes for the week or after meeting, who's seeing that? No one. Right. And now instead you have a CSM types up the notes from a really good meeting.

They put it in there, everyone has visibility, and then the AE says, oh, that's an opportunity to, to cross sell this product. Let's connect on that. Yeah. And so that increased visibility and bringing everyone together in the tool where everyone is that common platform, that common communication platform versus everyone putting all their information in siloed platforms that nobody else has access.

Like really [00:28:00] powerful 

Jeff: Salesforce, what's their chat feature name? I even forgot. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember. You 

Mike: know which, which no one. Yes I do. And at Branch at least no one really uses that. 

Jeff: You actually, you said the word thread, which just triggered something off. To me, a lot of this for me doesn't work unless people know how to use threads.

Right? Or else it's just mess. Right? Like, do you do any education like ? Please respond in thread. I have seen people, I, I, it's a little heavy handed sometimes, like, please respond in threads or else, yeah, I get lost very easily and stuff. 

Mike: We don't, we don't do any of that. But what we try to do is try, we try to model the behavior that we hope and expect others to use.

That's where I think if you can model the behavior in certain ways, you know, subject. For example, one of the things that we do with some of our customers is with the beginning of the thread, it's just subject in brackets with bold. And then the actual context of the thread of the, that conversation starts in that first comment of the thread.

Yeah. And that can be really effective, making sure that then people know, ok, I need to use the thread for this. It doesn't always work. Not [00:29:00] everyone necessarily is a heavy Slack user or necessarily likes threads, but I think people are starting to use it more and more. Remember, slack didn't have threads in the beginning, so, so more conditioned to not using threads cause that's just the way they worked originally.

But now I think with Slack threads being more and more used, it's becoming less and less of. So we just try to model the behavior that we're looking for. Got it. 

Jeff: That's awesome. And of course you go to natal giffy 

Mike: cuz everybody needs to put their of course. Yeah. The more gifts, the better. . What did I miss here?

Jeff: This is, this is amazing stuff. You know, we've got community, we've got upsell marketing just general day in and day out operations. 

Mike: Trying to think. We've covered, yeah, I think there's just a couple things like the, if you don't want, if you don't want people to engage in certain things, like after your implementation, you can take your implementation or pro serve team outta that channel.

It makes a very clear signal. They're gone, go back and need anything. They're over here. Yes. And then when they ask questions like, oh, what happened to, you know, Mike? And you're like, oh, well he's on the pro serve team, your, your [00:30:00] service. Contract ended, now you're operating with me, your customer success manager and your solutions engineer.

That's the first thing. So don't be afraid to get people out. Yeah. Where people can leave on their own. I think that can be really good and actually really healthy cuz it does train the customer well. Also, 

Jeff: just on that note, I, I use oh, I don't wanna say sticks and carrots, but like, I use sorry, milestones like that a lot so that it's very clear to people like you are live.

Two week burn. Congratulations. We are now at the point. Say bye to Mike. This is your csm. And it's just very clear to everybody and it shifts to a different sort of, you know you know, cause before you go live, there's, are you gonna go live? When are you gonna flip the switch? And there's a leverage thing and all these other little things where now it's just very clear who does what, what part of the customer journey are we in now 

Mike: as well.

So, One of the other carrots that, that we use as well, and I was chatting with the CSM earlier today from a large public SaaS company that they use this as well, is, you know, they might have Slack channels for customers above 50,000 arr, or [00:31:00] you know, hundred thousand, but somebody at a lower tier can get access to a Slack channel.

Via a pro serve engagement. Right. So they, they can charge. So this is also a revenue generating opportunity where it's like, oh, you want direct access to us? Oh, okay, you can get that. Let's do a pro serve. Oh, it's almost like a support gold level or something like that. Exactly. It's a different level of support.

And the way I kind of equate it is, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, support was done maybe in different methods. Right. A lot of phone support. Yep. Et cetera. And then email came along and beginning email was like, oh, I. My people email. I don't want my customers email. And then email became the centralized piece.

And now what we're seeing is this shift where everyone's already in Slack, everyone just wants to be supported in Slack. They don't wanna have to go to a different tool, which a lot of people aren't even using very much of anymore to do a request. They want that more real time. And so if you can meet them there and provide that really amazing experience, I think there's a lot of upside and benefits to it.

And so we've talked to everything. The post sales side, right? Close the contract implementation onboard and customer success, maybe [00:32:00] up sales and cross sales. Now what we're starting to see is actually and we're starting to use this as well, starting to bring Slack into the picture before the sale, before the contract flows.

And so pre-sales process where, let's say a company, are you doing 

Jeff: poc? Are you doing POCs as well? Yeah. That's a poc. 

Mike: Time to start doing the slack. Very. Cause in POCs, what do you want? You want you know, Time to value and first value. Time to first value. Absolutely. Yeah. First value. Slow. Like low friction.

Just quick responses, high engagement and slack is the best way to do that, right? So you can do that with the poc. They can see value. You can go back and forth. You can learn about problems more easily rather than it being isolated. The silo and request or like. Only on surface certain problems, like on a weekly phone call or something like that.

And so it can be much more effective on the POC side. And even before that, somebody reaches out and you're like, okay, yeah, no problem. Let's engage. Let's coordinate on Slack. I'm gonna, I'm gonna send you a shared channel link. Click on that, we'll be connected, and then we can coordinate a call. Do a [00:33:00] demo.

I can loop in other folks if you have questions. And you can start to do that on the presales side as well. To enable kind of faster sales cycles versus before what it was was email, right? And then it's like, oh, 

Jeff: and it's also, you can track level engage, track level engagement, almost like while you're tracking, like tracking email opens, right?

It's like your deal signals will go up because yeah, these people are just firing away. You know, people's, it's hard to get people's attention. So if they're asking questions in Slack, 

Mike: you've got their attention. So that's the other interesting thing. And this is what, this is another thing that P helps with actually.

 Not to sell too hard, but Basical. You see in your crm, all of your emails and your meetings. But what you miss is actually where in some cases, 80% of the work is actually happening, which is Slack. And so with something like that, you can start to track, okay, how many conversations happened, et cetera, and you can see what's that level of engagement.

Cause I think that type of information and those indicators can be really powerful on the, on the CS side, but also on the, on the sales. [00:34:00] Because we use a lot of those indicators to determine deal health. And when we go through our pipeline review on a weekly basis, we'll look, okay, when was the last time we engaged with this person?

And if you're engaging on Slack, but you're not on email, you know, you might miss it. You might think this is, or instead, and instead actually, they're highly engaged. They're engaged on a disconnected platform like Slack. You, you just made me, 

Jeff: I apologize, this is totally off the script and everything, but like this is, I'm, I'm now very curious.

A do you run a standard like QBR process and what is, how, how is your level of engagement on things like, like it doesn't have to be percentage based, but like going well, like definitely seeing an improvement or things like that. Because I feel like everybody struggles. You know, there's a big QBR question this year, like, what should we be doing?

But you're goes into the Bob London one. But I, I've got, I think we discussed our own opinions on that, but back on track here. The whole thing is about providing [00:35:00] value all the time, right? And, and actionable stuff. And when it happens, and not waiting until this you know, events to be able to start saying like, Hey, here's a chart in X, Y, and Z.

So I, I feel that I'm not a sure if you need them, or if you do, they might be a lot better just because people are just very so engaged with your product and 

Mike: everything. Yeah, yeah. You definitely, definitely can be. I, it's, it's a bit of correlation, not necessarily causation, but basical. The companies that are most engaged in Slack, for the most part, tend to also be the healthiest and tend to be the ones that upsell and cross sell the most, right?

Like I, I look at some of these companies that are just highly engaged, like, man, I wanna replicate this across the Slack channels that we have. Again, that's where the problem in. In terms of how do you scale that? And that's what the, like the Thena guys are doing in terms of helping scale that and making things automate and making things easier.

So CSM isn't bombarded with so many messages, right? Yeah. But [00:36:00] the, but that is a challenge, right? How do you scale that? But if you can scale that effectively and efficiently, then I think you can get, start to get some of these high engagement benefits in growth and nr. To a much broader set of customers beyond just the ones that you're highly servicing in that smaller number of channels.

And going back to qbr. Yeah, qbr, one of my favorites, I had a saying at Branch, I think it was 22, was the year of the qbr. Because I just wanted a lot more qbr and we've pushing really hard and I think what we, what we've iterated on is. For the really large companies. Yeah. Qbr do 'em quarterly basis.

Yep. Then you can do semi-annual or annual for the, as you go down in the tiers. Which is I think for like pretty standard practice, but when you can engage with people more, then I think you can start to get some of those touch points. So it's not like people know nothing. About branch and then they come in and they hear about it once every six months rather.

They're kind of up to date on most things. But that allows you to do, or what I've seen it allows you to do, you're able to go much deeper on the, on the qbr, where if you don't need to form that base level or go as deep on the base [00:37:00] level of assumptions and knowledge and context, and everyone already has that, and then you're able to go deeper into level two or level three conversations, you get a lot more out of those rather than just being a surface level.

Here are your metrics. Talk about that for an hour. Yeah, 

Jeff: that's. I think that's probably a good place. I know we could talk about this for hours. I told you try and keep the time on, on these for everybody's morning walks and, and jogs and everything. On that note, I always like to end with something as you can.

It's dark out. You can see it's almost pitch black here at four o'clock in the afternoon here in Boston. What is your, as we move into the winter, what's your big winter project or thing that you're 

Mike: doing for fun? Oh, man. What, what am I doing for fun? This used to be 

Jeff: my, my pandemic question, like are you baking bread?

Are you wearing guitar? Like what 

Mike: Well, I got, I got into road cycling last year in 20, because in 2020 I ate way too much food and put on some pounds. So I, I decided I had to lose it and then I bought a gravel bike and so just got it fixed yesterday. And so I think I'm gonna be heading out [00:38:00] on some, some gravel rides in the cold weather, which will be a lot of fun.

Oh, that's awesome. 

Jeff: That's great. Well listen always a pleasure. Just hold on for a second, we'll do some wrap up, but this was fascinating. I hope everybody else found it fascinating too because it's not the usual ground that's covered and I think it's almost on the revolutionary side, but this, this will be the way things are being done in, in a few, in a year or two 

Mike: or something like that.

So I, I think that's right on. I think it's the future. Absolutely. 

Jeff: So hold on one second and thanks so much and just hit pause here.