Jeff is joined by Bernadette Risley who has been in sales for a long time, starting in the late 90s with telecom expense management. She transitioned to IBM and was part of building their Academy Cloud team where she created a global mentorship program.

Jeff and Bernadette discussed using good sales tactics to be better CSMs, such as forecasting which involves understanding when customers will expand or are at risk so that revenue can grow.

As an example, they talked about having someone manage their own business who could give regular readouts on customer recurrence and why certain customers were one-time buyers vs repeat customers.

The discussion also includes:

• the importance of having a strategy in place before executing any customer success initiatives.

• how to review original objectives on a quarterly basis, as well as how to look three quarters out for expiring contracts.

• the need for CSMs to stay connected with customers throughout their journey in order to avoid surprises at renewal or upgrade conversations.

• CSMs need room for creativity when solving problems so they don't become robots just following a playbook.
  

You can listen here!

You can connect with Bernadette Risley via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernadetterisley/

Transcript:

Jeff  00:04

All right, so I'm here with burn Risley, who I met on LinkedIn I actually had posted, Blue was my interview with Christy like an interview, like I'm some big interview, I did a podcast with Christine Meltzer. And you're just like, we're like, boom with some comments. And then I was, you know, I wanted your background. And I was I really liked how you had made a transition from being a heavy hitter in sales, like heavy President's Club, all that fun stuff, right. Which we don't have to get into President's Club and what happens down there, but from what I've heard, it's a lot of strategic planning. But I just when we started talking, as I was like, Hey, I'm always looking for podcast guests that aren't in my network. I laugh because I'm like, I swear to God, if people hear me talking with another person from an DECA Oracle, it'd be like, you know, hey, I'll at that time we did x, people are just gonna just never listen, right? But it's just great to talk with people who have these different perspectives. I love to be proven wrong, and all these other things. So and I just said, Hey, what would you like to talk about? Right? So today, Brian's gonna talk to us about basically using I'll say, the good sales tactics to be a better CSM. Right. So welcome. Thanks for coming on board. Yeah,

Bernadette Risley  01:20

thanks for inviting me.

Jeff  01:22

Thanks for having like, and this is a no, like, we did a little pregame. We did a pre meeting like two weeks ago, and should have recorded that because we got really into it, but it took some notes. And you've got two people that can talk a lot. So we're gonna try and keep this on track here. But let's talk about just you know, we're not doing the whole autobiographical thing, we just give a couple quick hit points on your sales background in some of the things you and then we'll get to taking some of those learnings and apply it to CES. Ces leader as well, too. So I'm just just for everybody listening, like, like she has done this. This is not like a theory.

Bernadette Risley  02:00

And illusion. Yeah, so I I've been in sales for a very long time. But I started in tech, SAS sales in the late 90s, right after the Telecom Act of 1996. And there was a solution for the industry called telecom expense management. So it was a long run. So kind of stayed in that industry for some time.

Jeff  02:24

Was a monopoly. So I wouldn't write like so. It's

Bernadette Risley  02:28

funny enough, I'm, you know, I'm surprised it still is. So good for them. And then, you know, it, it just became apparent that, you know, tech, and SAS, you know, technology sales, and, you know, getting into that SAS industry was really where, where the market, you know, was heading towards, and big change happened when I got into IBM, and we can talk into that. But as far as my sales background, yes, like, I kind of went out to the elephants kind of landed them. I had a great territory, New York City, Metro Westchester, Long Island.

Jeff  03:06

patches, they say in sales. Yeah,

Bernadette Risley  03:08

I mean, you know, people probably would have paid a million dollars for my patch. You know, it was, it was a lot of fun. It was

Jeff  03:17

awesome. That's awesome. In so talk about how you in, remind me, because I love the story, how you sort of transition from sales, you're trying some new stuff out, sales can be pretty good burnout and everything. So as you started evolve, I think it's proper to say we kind of evolved into the sort of CS because CS wasn't even really a thing at the time.

Bernadette Risley  03:37

Yeah, no, it wasn't really a thing at all. And there were just some things within IBM where IBM was trying to figure stuff out. I think over a course of maybe a quarter they had scooped up about 25 set different SaaS companies.

Jeff  03:51

Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, like a big placemat. You'd look down and see all the things that the Yeah,

Bernadette Risley  03:56

yeah, I mean, they had all kinds of stuff. You know, that cleans your, you know, living room or something, whatever. The Weather Channel? Yes. makes so much sense. I know. I was I was amazed. But I just got very curious. And so I sort of, you know, found my way outside of, you know, my little silo. Yes, we were purchased by IBM. That's how we we became IBM errs and went into kind of mainstream and got very familiar with some folks that were building a brand new team called, you know, the cloud Academy cloud. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna call it and I became part of that I showed them some of the things that I did from a metric standpoint, and they were interested in what I was doing, and we, we, you know, they kind of brought me into that kind of family and I started to do a lot of presentations and got connected with how they wanted to roll this out and started to mentor and and

Jeff  05:00

was IBM Oh, sorry, you're about to say something I just jumped right over. was IBM still doing on premise? Or were they started moving into SAS at this point in time?

Bernadette Risley  05:10

So they still had a huge on premise. Yeah, business. Yeah. So I mean, this this part where they sort of bought all the SAS companies was a way for them to, to be competitive or to understand how they needed to move to cloud. And, and when, when all that happened, they had obviously changed a lot of other things, revenue models, people model, things like that. And so, for people are familiar with IBM, everybody had like some acronym that was their title. So it was SEL and see that and, and so the lower level was considered a C E, which is a client executive. And one day, you know, it was Ginni Rometty, his team woke up and said, Hey, if you're a CTE, you're not that anymore, you're going to be a customer success manager. And there was a lot of ambiguity on what that meant and what their new job was. And so what I was able to do is get familiar with how these people could be trained up and understanding what that post sale looks like, from a from in a SAS world. And I did that created a global mentorship program with directors and managers and, and filtered that down to the folks that really needed that help.

Jeff  06:34

Awesome. Oh, well, thanks for the background. I appreciate it. So when we were chatting, we really got into like, using sales tactics. And when I say tactics, I don't mean like the sneaky stuff, either, right? Like it's not.

Bernadette Risley  06:48

We can talk about that if you want. Today's the

Jeff  06:51

29th Here's a discount, and but you get assigned by the 30. Euro, or the price goes up, actually defer that literally heard that about two hours ago. But we're talking about really just approaching it almost like with a different business lens, right. You know, I could very much throw a generalized statement out there, that, you know, CES, people, they don't like to think in these types of business terms, I always say they're huggers, they don't want to put the business relationship in front of people. Now, a lot of people are they're really reacting, like, Oh, my God, I gotta kind of watch revenue and things like that. So let's get into some of these sales, like best practices and how to apply those to, to see us I think the first item we talked about for a really long time was on forecasting.

Bernadette Risley  07:47

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So you know, let me just go a little quick story back on IBM. So when I transitioned, and I was reporting to say, you know, the account management side of the house. The one thing that and I was the one thing that my boss used to say, to me is like, burn, you can have to get rid of the sales hat. Why? Why? And apparently, you know, if you're a salesperson, it is. It's almost impossible. I mean, it for me anyway. I mean, I'm a salesperson at, you know, my nature is to make sure that, you know, we have this relationship, I can still sell you more. So that's just the way I am. Yep. But as much as he said that, and as little as we all knew about customer success. That's exactly what customer success needs.

Jeff  08:44

Oh, how dare you

Bernadette Risley  08:47

need a little sales? Pat? In the process? Oh, absolutely. If you talk about Yeah, if you're talking about best practices, really, truly understanding what that sales process is not from the initial sale, but what the job is of the customer success manager, and how they strategically can fulfill that out you know, so and not to get all mixed up here. But why not? To do the reverse. It's, it's not happening today. And it needs to happen where the sales team understands this incredible amount of data that they can access from their customer success manager to help them sell better to their customers to help them sell more of a story and that more of you know, lands they need to sell the story. And and so as a best practice, you know what I shy away from not hiring someone because they don't have a sales background. Absolutely not. Because it's not someone that I need to go land the elephants like, you know, City of New York and JPMorgan Chase. No, I need Get someone to recognize, you know, the points at which a customer will be able to expand and buy more. Yep. And that's pretty much what it is.

Jeff  10:10

Yeah. And it was one of the things we talked about, because when we're getting into forecasting, in some of the things I came away is I see a lot of people like, okay, q4 starts Oh, my God, let's see to work backwards. December, November, October, right? So I'm going to focus on my October customers in October, right. But the sales, right is not like that, you kind of view things out on a multi quarter sort of lens, right?

Bernadette Risley  10:37

So that that really does segue very nicely, because we just talked about customer success managers understanding, or recognizing when a customer needs to expand or when they should expand or when they are going to expand, right. And so I taught every team that I lead, had a forecast. And what I mean by that is, if I'm at the beginning of q1, right, right, my team should be able to tell me in that quarter, so there, so this prior work to be done. But in the quarter burn, here's who here are the companies that are going to be expanding, here's, here's the revenue attached to that expansion, here's the opportunity, you know, and here are the ones that are at risk. So it's a, it's a read out, yep, telling me how my revenue is going to grow in this quarter. And what I need to look out for, so maybe I can mitigate any any risk, but that tells you a couple of things, it tells you number one, my CSMs are digging deeper, they have to because they have to report to me and tell me what their what these customers are doing. Right. So they're going to dig deeper, they're going to know more, they're going to know more what the customer is doing. And number two, they're going to be able to understand the importance of forecasting, when it comes to the idea of how their business will grow. So this is a silly example. But it's one that I did with my team. So if I have if I have someone who likes to come into work when we were in the, in the business of going to an office, and likes, you know, the lashes and all that fun stuff, including myself, okay, yeah. Okay. I would say, Hey, you just opened up an amazing lash studio. I just gave you the money to do that. So I'm going to come and visit you once a quarter. And I want you to give me a readout on how your business is doing what customers are recurring, which ones are coming back, which ones are one and done and why, you know, how are you building the business? So you're in charge? And, you know, I'm here to support where you need help. So that that's pretty much you know, kind of puts them back in a seat where they feel comfortable. Oh, wow, I have a business that can run.

Jeff  13:02

Yeah. You know, versus say, like, I don't know what anyway, I'm like, every day, I'm just trying to figure out what to do. Going from fire to fire or phone call the phone call without a strategy.

Bernadette Risley  13:13

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it does take a certain level of let's call it. Strategy, strategy, maturity. Maybe, yeah, understanding a lot of, you know, what you've done in the past, you know, I don't think you I think strategy grows as you mature in the business, and being able to recognize some of those some of those things that you haven't in the past. And

Jeff  13:41

that's a good transition, because we talked about the strict the strategy aspect of stuff. But then there's the execution of

Bernadette Risley  13:48

it. Yeah.

Jeff  13:51

Classic Northeastern, like, let's talk about getting it done, right.

Bernadette Risley  13:55

Let's get it done. Oh, my goodness. So, you know, it's, you know, you talk about a whiteboard, and there was this, this one company where we had a fishbowl and it was like, the biggest conference room and it was a huge fishbowl, and that and the whiteboard went from one end to the other. And it was basically, you know, how it was gonna be designed as the customer journey, you know, that stayed on there for like, three years, nobody can ever erase that customer journey, because God forbid, yeah, we didn't know what to do next. That's, that's really it's, it's partially joke, but, but primarily, it's true. You know what it is? You can have tools in place. You can have great CSMs, right. A playbook, a strategy, whatever it is, it has to, you have to really teach your team Name, what execution means and why it's so important. So when you have, you know, when you have onboarding, right, it's probably the most important area where execution, you know, is needed and required based on maybe the customer's timelines based on timelines, where resources are available for that customer versus, you know, coming on down the line, like, how many times right? Have you seen where a customer is not onboarding for six weeks? Why? Oh, everybody onboard them, we don't have anybody on implementation, we're all backed up. Right? So it's really, really, it really gets to be very tricky. I think what I would see what I would want to hear, if I were interviewing someone, knowing that they're not just a transactional kind of person is to really understand a story on how they actually executed and created an impact both for the business and for the customer. So how did that work? And why was it so important? How do you carry that out in your every day? You know, portfolio?

Jeff  16:14

Yeah, yeah. Just that that's the actually understanding what the customer is trying to do, and then be able to map back what your technology does to allow them to do it, and then keep telling them that too, right. Like, it's not just like, Okay, great. We turn that on. That's good. It's like, hey, remember that thing we talked about two months ago? Here's a report on how you guys are dealing with that now. Like, don't wait for your three month QBR to do that send a looms, some send some fast over different subject for a different day and things like that?

Bernadette Risley  16:44

Oh, well, I mean, just one quick thing. I mean, we all know, QBR, you know, took a hit. I mean, but here's what I said, here's, here's what, here's why I belong,

Jeff  17:00

I'm still a fan of them as in like some, yeah, I'm a fan

Bernadette Risley  17:03

where, where lives very comfortably in a certain area. And I think where it lives comfortably is when you have several products, right. And you have a company that has, you know, many different types of products, and, you know, maybe maybe different people who are managing that you might like, I know that there are some very large tech companies out there that have a ton of products and for each product, you have a CSM. Yeah. So to come together once a quarter. And, you know, very elegantly present everything in the picture of the people that need to see it at that level. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. When you when you when you have, you know, a product, and I'm not saying this, this needs to be dumbed down in any way, but when you when you need to do something like that. I always look at what what did they originally want to accomplish? Right? So what were those core objectives? Did we like go off track. So if I'm going to do something on a quarterly basis, or if I'm going to do something right after onboarding, I'm going to go back to, hey, let's just do a review of those, those original objectives. Take a look. Oh, and by the way, and you and I both know, Jeff, that almost on a quarterly basis, as the companies that we've worked for, or the companies that we work for now. They change. Yeah. So So these objectives are changing, right? The revenue while everything changes, and so you want to be in a position where the people that you are working, you know, your customer, you want to make sure that they you have that transparency, and they're telling oh, by the way, you know, we do have this new use case, and we want to talk to you about it, but we're going to bring it on let's go let's let's figure it out, you know, it's so important to really make sure that you're taking the customer back to that original core objective, right? Because that's where their success starts. You can grow it but you have to know where it started. And you have to make sure that the product journey and all your feedback loops are going back to the technical teams as well.

Jeff  19:21

Yep, absolutely. By the way all CSM is listening take note knows how burn use my name when she was reporting back to me classic sales tactic right there you go you were in full salesperson mode there for a second don't hey, let's let's take it back a little bit right you're right you can't you can't can't watch that sales, audio. Anything else on we talked for so long a risk and adoption and renewal and protection. What are we missing here? Especially when you know turns a big problem these days? A there's the prevent But then there's just the like, knowing about it early enough. So you can do something about it. Right?

Bernadette Risley  20:04

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that I've done with the teams and also coming into a brand new company as a leader, is, most of the time when a company realizes that they need customer success. It's it's usually a little little too late. Yeah. And so there's already a turn problem. Yeah. And all of a sudden, you own it, you know, to some degree. So in one of the companies that I worked for, what we did is we looked three quarters out. And you look so for example, we're in November, right? So

Jeff  20:46

do you do on your q2 work? Right? You're doing your due to for 2023? Yeah,

Bernadette Risley  20:51

yeah. So say beginning of q3, whatever is expiring in the beginning of q3, 2023. And work your way back. So you have a better opportunity of mitigating risks, or companies that aren't expiring right away? Yeah, I'm not saying I'm not saying reach out to him now. Well, that's I'm saying that's the that's the whole thing. Reach out to them now. Yeah. Right, figure out what the process is, if there's any risk involved. And then the ones that you have, you know, within the month within the quarter, you know, those are the ones that you're just gonna have to jump through hoops and do all those things that we all know about, you know,

Jeff  21:30

execs involved make a little boy, you know, maybe get to Chick fil A, and they are for

Bernadette Risley  21:37

Chick fil A, whatever it takes. Yeah, but I mean, it's, it's the tail end, if you follow the process, it actually does work. I mean, I've seen a lot of, you know, percentage of points go down based on using that kind of a of a Macau methodology. Yeah. And

Jeff  21:58

that's, that's that forecasting that I just don't see, I normally see CS leaders treating it on the quarter, right? Yeah. But, you know, if you're doing your book of business, correct, it's kind of like in the sales strategy, it should be so natural, the renewal conversation, because you've kept in touch with them. Well, however you are broadcasting value, whether it's a QBR, or whatever, I don't think we should take them away, we just need to make them better, right? So. But people just keep getting surprised, I've seen customers that go in pitching a big upgrade, and they get churned and they're like, what happened? They're like, You don't you don't know your customer, there's no KYC going on at all. So

Bernadette Risley  22:42

yeah, and that's all thing. I mean, like, you know, we talked about earlier, you know, putting the, you know, putting the CSM, having them, adopt the accountability that's required, right to manage a book of business. So there's lots of things that fallen, you know, that fall into that same bucket that don't make it easy. And what I mean by that is, you know, they might have 40 accounts, a little hard, a little hard, there may not be a digital motion at this, you know, so there. So a lot of the churn might be with some of the smaller customers, which, you know, in some large companies could be a million dollars or more right, with smaller customers. So you have to kind of weigh out what is going to work for you. But I do believe that as a CSM, you need to know, you know, you need to be able to have that transparency, gain a customer's trust, and find out to that when you do or you don't get the ability to meet others like oh, so Jeff, could you you know, introduce me to so and so because what I really like to do is tell him what a great job you're doing, you know, why don't you bring them to the next call? I mean, it's got to be about them. And you have to understand, you know, it's it's all about the behavior and when you have behavior that is not suiting you. It's still not about you, but you have to figure out a way to get around it.

Jeff  24:19

Yeah, no, it's and that can be the hardest part. It's just got off a couple of those today. It can just be hard right? If somebody wants to share what's it about you Jeff? That's all I'm sure I did something wrong don't get but like no was was one of my customers on sort of setting up a meeting with a very tough client and coming in and reporting to them like look at all this new sales. You guys are generating a lot of business through our platform and everything. And I thought it was going to be all you know unicorns and rainbows during the meeting by starting off positive like this. And then it just turned out to be like, we can't stand using any of your reporting and like it You know, the types of things when you're selecting each other being like me should have invited product to this call. It just happens. Right? And so,

Bernadette Risley  25:10

yes, your feedback loop. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's so important. And that really like, you know, it's funny, it's, I want to say CSMs. You know, you know, that definition should be so Chris. But I'm getting away from believing a CSM is the the conductor or the CSM is, is the quarterback? I don't believe that anymore. You know why? Tell me more? This isn't? Okay, I guess. Yeah. If you think about a SaaS company, you know, there comes a time and you know, you've seen like, the bowtie model, right. So when they reach a certain amount of revenue, you know, you got to really start servicing and paying attention to, you know, the existing revenue and all that fun stuff. Think about it like a nervous system, your nervous system touches every single organ in your body, right? Your nervous system, it's like your nervous system sends messages to every single organ in your body. Right? So. So let's see if Sam made made, execute on something product executes on something, a technical engineer, and we're all connected. So we, whatever the technical engineer does, is going to affect the CSM, what product does or doesn't do is going to affect the company, the, you know, the customer, it's, it's all connected. So that's kind of how it needs to work. I mean, that's why, you know, you and I are talking about like, the sales and CSM, they need to kind of like understand how both sides. So we need to understand what happens when a product decides not to do a feature,

Jeff  27:14

or there really is a feature that breaks or breaks something, what's

Bernadette Risley  27:18

that impact? And how does it roll down? How does it affect the company as if

Jeff  27:24

it's a bad day for the CSA? I liked I

Bernadette Risley  27:29

said this customer facing sales and customer facing we all get that. But you know what? The technical people like products that people who roll under the CTO or the CIO, they need to see that part of the business. And that's something that I think is just charting.

Jeff  27:48

Yeah, it's it's exactly like, I'm always trying to pull sale, sorry, product people on to calls, even if it's good or bad, just be on calls, hear what people's feedback is and everything. And you know, it's a big thing in product like, oh, you should be talking to users and this and that, but to get them to actually jump on a call sometimes. You know, it can be a struggle, it can be a struggle, it maybe

Bernadette Risley  28:12

needs to be part of their bonus, how many? How many customer calls? Are you on? Mr. CTO? Oh,

Jeff  28:17

that's a good point. I used to, if I can, I always recommend this is to have everybody have a pretty good sizeable chunk of their bonus structure be be tied back to retention. Because just like the nervous system, like you were saying, I've, I've been in rooms where people will like, that's great, I would go get on that because that customer wants it. But that's not what I'm bonused about, like, flat out. They're not like a VP of development, right? Like, sorry, that's not what I'm being asked to do. Like, now suddenly, they're not going to be able to go to Hawaii in the wintertime, because they're not going to get their bonus because the customers are all pissed off. You know, people think a little bit differently after that. So

Bernadette Risley  29:05

Exactly, yeah, I mean, you know, revenue models and compensation models. They haven't really been looked at as much. You know, I'll just give you an example. Like, you know, being at Citrix for five straight years and being there when they started. There wasn't, there wasn't really a big swing. You know, it took a while we were still doing things the old way. We're still doing very siloed work, everyone was executing, but no one was was executing in collaboration of what the other person was doing was all after the fact. And as because nobody was really tied to the same end goal and that's why we always talk about it like if the customer you know, the end goal is is to make the customer happy. Everything internally this whole nervous system has to have have the same kind of motivation, the same kind of incentive? Yeah, we can't have different ones. Another good example is I had the head of support. And one of my team calls, I just hey, you know, I want you to come on my call, I want you to talk to my team, you know, because there was a lot of support, you know,

Jeff  30:22

you know, I think it's great. Yeah. I always had like, guest speakers all the time. It's, this is what Yeah, absolutely.

Bernadette Risley  30:28

And I went on to say, Oh, by the way, did you know that my CSMs have a KPI for the amount of days, they onboard a customer. And what he said was, I had no idea, right? Because they were getting to certain things that were preventing us, or CSMs from moving forward, like fixing something or making a configuration that, you know, the tech couldn't do. So we had to put, you know, put it into support. And that's just communication. That's part of the nervous system.

Jeff  31:08

Nervous System is you're, you're you're looking for a TED Talk. There you go. That's the nervous.

Bernadette Risley  31:14

Um, maybe I don't know, I have this other idea for my TED talk, but we'll see.

Jeff  31:19

Okay. Awesome. And I was just looking at the time I try and keep these under half an hour. So I'm looking through my notes, I think we covered a lot of it. It's funny how I always think I'm gonna go in with some super tactical thing, and it winds up always coming back to like, the bigger picture, right? Like, you know, it's like no, oh, yeah.

Bernadette Risley  31:43

Like my dive down into my kids, you know, an F bomb or something like that. Whatever you want me to do. I'm using medic

Jeff  31:50

two. Now. Just kidding. No.

Bernadette Risley  31:54

No, we talked, the only other thing that I think you and I pre talked about was the creativity in the plane. Oh,

Jeff  31:59

yeah. No, that's super important. Because Because we people can turn into robots if they're just following the playbook.

Bernadette Risley  32:04

Yeah. So I had a call with this one potential. Employer, I guess. And, and the reason for this position is because a lot of the people that reported to her were very tactical that kind of fell into that tactical motion, and they needed someone to like shake things ups, you know, strategy, you know, here, here's three options. Which one do I'm gonna execute on? Okay, great. I got it considered done. Um, you know, a couple of things with that. One is it's coachable. And it's also teachable, okay? Because I was able to do that with my team. So maybe not everybody can do that. But when you give that kind of, you know, you give them that room like a CSM to Don't worry about checking the boxes in this, you know, customer success, CRM, right? I need you to create a solution, because that's what the customer needs. So come back to me with what you think we can do. Get the people you need presented to me and let's let's do it. Do you think it's because

Jeff  33:25

people are so they've got so many customers, so they're following the playbook? Like, I'm wondering, I don't know how to actually experience in this, maybe you have some, like when you're a CSM for really large named accounts or something like that, where you've got like, you know, some Amazon or some huge customer like that, where you're just focusing on them, do you think that you're a little bit more creative? And not just following a playbook in that sense?

Bernadette Risley  33:50

Yeah, I mean, the only reason why I'm saying that is because if you do have a customer like that, you're not just dealing with one person, I'm sure you're dealing with a host of different teams. So the one thing that you can probably run into is exactly what we're talking about, which means that Amazon may not be a nervous system, they may not be talking to each other, they might be working as like AWS, and Merchandising, and you know, whatever else and you know, that can also pose a problem for a very large company like that. So if if I have a CSM that says, hey, you know what this customer needs, you know, X, Y, Z, and I can get this done. If I just pull in this person. I'm like, do it, you know, don't worry about checking all the boxes and all the different tasks. You know, I want to see that the customer is moving down the journey and that the customer is excited and happy and will continue to buy. So you can do that then. Right.

Jeff  34:58

That's it that's See right there? Yep. Awesome. Well, let's do this. Let's move on. Let's get off of CES. I always like to wrap up with some fun. What's What's the winter plans now that we're waiting for the snow to arrive? What's the big winter initiative?

Bernadette Risley  35:13

The winter initiative? So my initiative is to probably go to Colorado and visit my son and daughter in law sometime in January again, and and I don't know, I mean, I know what a fly. That's right. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I have two or three kids are I have to, you know, so the other ones in New York. I mean, that's really what I do. I mean, when I have time off, I go to my kids, and that's great. Colorado, New York. And then my my daughter's in Nashville.

Jeff  35:47

Nice. music scene.

Bernadette Risley  35:51

It's great down there. Yeah, it's, it's beautiful. They live literally right in the mountains. I mean, it's,

Jeff  35:56

I actually have not been there. It's on the list. Now that my kids are getting a little older, we can make those trips where it doesn't have to be to an amusement park and everything. We're not doing that anymore. Like that's, it's we've driven to the Grand Canyon. You graduated from that? Yeah, the big thing was we went to the went to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. And, but then they were like, Okay, the next thing is going to be a little bit more relaxing. Because what's your take every day? For a couple years, yeah,

Bernadette Risley  36:23

they like hiking. Let me tell you, if you come to Asheville, you'll love

Jeff  36:27

it. Oh, that's awesome. Awesome, awesome burn. It's been a pleasure. This is awesome. I appreciate it. I'm going to hold on because I'm going to end the recording. And then we can just wrap up after that. So I'm going to post your LinkedIn profile any other place that you want to point people to or anything like that?

Bernadette Risley  36:45

No, if anybody would like to connect, just certainly connect with me on LinkedIn. Happy to do that. And thanks so much, Jeff, thanks so much for the opportunity.

Jeff  36:55

 No, thanks for chatting. I don't get to go down this road that I always have theories about it. So it's great to really talk with somebody who can who can bring in both sides and see how both can work well together. So awesome. So let me just stop the recording.