306: Outcomes Over Optics; with Carl Lenocker

Great support can look “perfect” on paper and still fail the customer in real life. That tension is what we dig into with Carl Lenocker, a senior customer success executive, executive coach, and longtime support leader, as we unpack a simple idea with big consequences: outcomes over optics.

We get concrete about how traditional support KPIs like first contact resolution, time to answer, and fast ticket closure can quietly create the wrong behaviours. When the business rewards speed and box-checking, teams get pushed toward rushed calls, prematurely closed cases, and fewer relationship-building moments. Carl shares lessons from running global support at HP and why many of these pressures ultimately trace back to money, cost cutting, and the old “support as a cost center” story, especially during the outsourcing era.

From there, we look forward. We talk about AI in customer support as a way to handle simple issues quickly, and why the real opportunity is to reinvest human time into premium, consultative, relationship-driven support that prevents the next ticket and protects renewals. We also call out action faking, including performative QBRs, and Carl breaks down what actually matters in a customer business review: business objectives, progress, and risks, not 50-slide theatre.

If you lead support or you’re building a career in post-sale, you’ll leave with sharper language for executives, better internal alignment, and a clearer way to prove value beyond dashboards. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share this with a support leader who needs it, and leave a review with the metric you think your team should stop worshipping.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Support Matters

Charlotte Ward 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode three hundred and six of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today Carl Lenocker talks about outcomes over optics. Today I'd like to welcome Carl Leneker. Carl, it's lovely to have you on the podcast for the first time. Thank you for joining me.

Carl Lenocker 0:41

Well, thank you, Charlotte. I'm a fan of the show. I was just talking to you backstage about how much I love your jazz on the intro. It's very relaxing.

Charlotte Ward 0:48

Oh, isn't it just? Yeah, thank you so much. That piece is called You Have the Answer, and I feel like it is apt in so many ways for this show because this is a support show and we want our support folks to have the answers for our customers. But but also there's a little bit of me that thinks, you know, we're supporting leaders out there, so we're helping them find the answers as well. I didn't know it was that layered and nuanced when I picked that jazz intro, but I do love it. Thank you. Um for the benefit of those listeners, would you um do a little bit of an intro? Tell us about yourself.

Carl Lenocker 1:23

Sure, absolutely. Um, you know, for for folks at home who are listening, because I know they don't have the video, I, you know, just to set the stage, I am a uh 50-year-old, old, haggard businessman who's been in the industry for, you know, 30 plus years, as you can imagine. And uh, you know, certainly fit the stereotype when I walk into a boardroom, you know, the customer tends to lean back in their chair and they take one look at me and they say, Oh my god, that guy looks like he's seen some stuff. I want to take advice from him.

Charlotte Ward 1:51

He doesn't look that bad, everybody. I mean, he really does.

Carl Lenocker 1:56

Well, thank you for for you're you're an excellent liar. I appreciate it. Um, but no, I've I've been doing this for for such a long time, and I'm currently a senior customer success executive uh and uh and an author and a keynote speaker and an executive coach, kind of doing everything, covering all the bases. But um, you know, things started for me, you know, 30 plus years ago on the edges of Silicon Valley. I just happened to be fortunate enough to not be, you know, growing up there, but kind of in within spitting distance of Silicon Valley, kind of where I came up around the Sacramento area. And uh, you know, I was working in a computer store in in 1998 or 99, I think. And I happened to run into a guy uh in a New Year's Eve party who I used to work with at the computer store. And he told me about this great opportunity at Hewlett-Packard, where he was at, on the help desk. And, you know, this all ties in very much to your to your audience because most of my career has kind of been spent in support. And and I, you know, grew up at HP for 13 years and in a number of support roles, and uh, you know, kind of grew into a manager of global support there and and a director of data center. And ultimately I ended up on the customer success

Carl’s Path From Help Desk

Carl Lenocker 3:05

side. And I surround myself these days with post-sale folks, uh, like a lot of the folks in your audience. And, you know, my passion at the moment is growing top 1% customer success leaders. Uh, it's it's something that, you know, I've become passionate about as I have, you know, been speaking at a number of events over the last few years. Um, you know, people come up to me afterwards and they they generally ask, you know, how do I how do I grow my career on the post-sale side of things? And, you know, you're one of the few people who have done it. Give me the secrets to success on this. And uh I recognize that it's hard. I mean, compared to sales, you know, we generally on the post sale side are under-recognized, underpaid, underappreciated, all these things. And so uh it it is a difficult thing to do. And, you know, love to talk to you more about it throughout the episode.

Charlotte Ward 3:52

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a lot to unpack there. Yeah, completely. The the post-sales side, um, and I mean, obviously the the this show is focusing on the tip of the spear, the support team, the support leaders who are out there day to day with customers, and like uh focusing on just getting stuff out the door in a in a service, you know, with a service perspective. So making things work, getting customers to get that thing implemented, get that thing working, you know, deliver that thing to them rather than sell them the next thing necessarily, even. Um so deeply operational. Uh I I can very much say hand on heart, deeply unappreciated. Um, and uh and a hard space to grow not just in but from as well. And so I think uh yeah, I'd love to know more about your trajectory there too. And by the way, that's one of the few times I've ever been able to say the word trajectory first time. I always find that really hard to say. I don't know why. I I I don't know why. It's it's a weird combination, but um we are nonetheless here to talk about that whole ecosystem of uh like how you um how you talk about outcomes and how they can deliver exactly what you're talking about, like that growth that that people are so often looking for in post-sales, right? And we we as we chewed over this episode, we talked about this idea of outcomes over optics. Um can you can you maybe just begin with like breaking that down a little? Like what do we really mean when we talk about outcomes over optics? What's the what's the at the heart of that?

Carl Lenocker 5:35

Yeah, I I mean this is an important topic because I I think I really started to kind of see this, you know, 20-ish years ago in my career where you know I was being held to some some crazy metrics when I was running the global service desk at HP, right? It my my team was being asked to do things like resolve, you know, 95% of the calls that they that they receive on the first point of contact, and then answer the phone within two minutes and close every ticket within you know two days of opening, like all these crazy metrics that um as a manager and somebody who had done the job of taking calls and then this guy didn't really see the point of some of these metrics in terms of how do they relate to customer happiness. So, on one hand, I would go to you know, board meetings internal and say, my team's doing great, they're checking all these boxes, but I still had you know angry, screaming customers escalating to me on the daily that people were closing tickets out early that didn't need to be closed, you know, their problems weren't being solved, uh, my folks were you know being uh you know rushed in their in their tone to get people off the phone. They weren't you know focusing on the relationship. And you know, it all comes back to you know that that night when I when I got the job in '98, right? If if if I wouldn't have had a relationship with someone who would have got me in the door in the first place, I might never have even been there. And my my life would be so different than it is uh today. So I just, you know, I think maybe that's why that the overarching theme of relationships is something that has just been a big part of my life. And I I owe so much to folks who have opened doors for me. And, you know, so many of my past customers even are great friends to this day. Um I think when you're when you're focusing on on metrics, KPIs, you know, sometimes you miss the forest for the trees, right? It's it's still a game of relationships. We go back to, you know, 200 years ago, the way the business was done, it's all about getting close to our clients, understanding their pain, addressing their pain. Um, I think that we we do a poor job sometimes these days on trying to measure everything in that regard and getting a little bit too clinical with how we how we look at performance, right?

Charlotte Ward 7:39

Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is uh really the industrialization of service we're talking about, isn't it? Once once you get uh once you are in an environment in any way that resembles a production line, it's about shipping rather than than necessarily, as you said, building the relationships, building the longer-term success, building the value long term in in a way that 200 years ago would have been doing the job well. Um and unfortunately, technology um at every stage of the last 200 years has just accelerated our obsession with with doing things quicker, faster, and checking boxes, right? And you know, being obsessed with time and obsessed with quantity over quality. Um and I think that the the call center in all its forms is probably the place where which is uh like the what I would call the typical hothouse for these kind of metrics. But they are really prevalent across all support teams, I would say. And and to your point, like having stepped up from doing the job into leading that team, um those metrics aren't necessarily even set by people who have done the job because you did the job, and when you moved up into leading that team, you could see the problems with those metrics, right? So so quite often these are set from the wider business somewhere, somehow, for some reason. Um

When KPIs Create Angry Customers

Charlotte Ward 9:10

what do you think is the driving, like let's just talk a little bit about that, because what do you think is the driving um force behind the kind of metrics that we see applied externally to service teams by the business, by senior leadership, by you know, uh somewhere else in the business putting pressure on to close, you know, close tickets quicker, move on to the next call, all of those things you just mentioned. What is that pressure from within the business?

Carl Lenocker 9:42

It it's certainly money, right? I mean, as I've gotten older and more experienced in in the business, uh in and done all types of roles on the post-hill side of the ball, I've learned that this business comes down to to the buck at the end of the day uh when it comes to those types of decisions. And it actually makes me think back to uh early you know 2000s, uh during uh what I I kind of refer to as like the outsourcing crisis that we went through as an industry back, right? Where um, you know, we had a bunch of help desks, you know, my own included, actually, that were outsourced, you know, and there was a set of metrics and everything was commoditized. And our customers were absolutely unhappy about it. You know, they didn't want that, they wanted to talk to the folks that they had built relationships with on our help desk, folks who had worked there, you know, for 20 years and they they had become accustomed to talking to these folks. Some of them had their direct emails, some of them had their direct phone numbers, right? They worked around the system and they, but they were very happy. And then when things were outsourced and we started kind of looking at these metrics on on you know what is considered a success in support, I think that that was that was the first demonstration that I saw that this is all about money because now you have a customer that's very, very unhappy. We're calling that a success based on the metrics. It's totally not, and nobody cares. I mean, in in 2010, nobody cared. You know, they just cared that we get this this cost of IT off the books and shift it over here to this other external firm. And uh as a VP of support, I get my bonus and I parachute out of here and I'm on to the next one.

Charlotte Ward 11:17

Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And that is because particularly back then, support was very much seen as just a cost center. And and I I've heard the you know the the the narratives and the tactics and the all of the like the conference speakers for 20 years talking about flipping that narrative, how we change from being a cost center to adding value and demonstrating value as well, which it which is it's actually quite hard to do. I mean, I I it's I think we're all struggling a bit with that still, how you demonstrate value and value add beyond saving money. And and this absolutely comes down to the relationships you're talking about, but particularly in support, where it's actually quite rare for support folk to have the opportunity to spend a concentrated amount of time with one customer. Um, it's hard to demonstrate that value because it is actually frankly still quite operational. We still have to support the whole customer base. It's rare that we're working with one customer.

Carl Lenocker 12:29

This is true. I mean, yeah, this is true. And as I've as I've kind of transitioned onto the customer success side, it's taken me back to the old days of support, I feel like, because you know I work, I work in strategics, I work in an enterprise, and um I manage customers that are some of the largest customers in the industry in terms of you know their spend. Uh, I carry a book of business that's over $50 million at this point that's just composed of a few clients in the fortune, you know, Fortune 50. Um, and I would say that that has enabled me to return to the old ways of actually getting to know my customer, getting deeply embedded, really understanding their business, you know, direct, direct phone calls, one-on-one, regular meetings, you know, getting to know what what really uh causes their pain and how we can address it. Um, and so it's much easier now to measure value, you know, when I'm when I'm in this role uh versus when I was in support. Uh, you know, I I I definitely um, you know, I you and I talked backstage about how I I just feel like you know, in support these days, it's it's it's kind of a travesty in terms of you know what we ask support folks to do. Um, you know, going and and and make the customer happy. And but we're not gonna give you time to build a relationship and we're not gonna reward you for you know going above and beyond outside of the metrics and and things that really make the customer happy. It's hard. So I would say that if you're a young person on support, you know, listening to this pod, um, and you're looking for a career path, you know, definitely consider customer success. I mean, it's it's something I think uh you're you're pre-programmed for and you've got a lot of experience doing, whether you know it or not.

Charlotte Ward 14:02

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I actually think there's also, you know, there's a lot of uh uh blurred edges there between success and support, particularly at the enterprise level, of course, where you really are almost forming account teams anyway, which include some technical assistance in some form, even if you don't call it support, right? There's a technical account managers, there's people there who are um whose task it is to ensure the the further activation on the product from a you know from a uh let's I'm just gonna use the word technical again, from a technical perspective, rather than necessarily, you know, talking about business value or anything, anything even so more at the at the center of success traditionally. Um when um inside support um the the idea that you might be able to get spend that much time with one customer is is somewhat still of anathema. But I but I think we do have opportunities now, maybe, I hope, that are quite different from say 2010. And I think those opportunities are sort of born somewhat of AI. Um, and I think I think the thing we're still feeling out, and I'm not going to make this an AI conversation, but I think what's happening we're at an interesting time, let's say, where some of the problems we were trying to solve 25 years ago with outsourcing are now solvable with AI. It's like how do you solve, how do you serve customers who just have simple problems quickly? Because frankly, customers who have simple problems mostly want to be served quickly and just move on with their day. Um, and I think that is true at the enterprise level as it is of of someone who you know needs a needs the pin reset on their bank card, you know, or or needs to uh that pair of shoes returned or whatever. Shoe returns are a common example, I cite for some reason. But but you know, there's there's these simple tasks for which frankly customers, I think, modern customers are perfectly willing to hand off to an AI, a chatbot, whatever, that's a low friction, low entry, simple task, quickly solved, everyone can move on. And that is a super low cost to the business, to the vendor, isn't it, to this to to the uh service provider at that point. Um if they're smart, I think what what the opportunity is is to not terminate all of their support stuff, but actually to reappropriate them into something that is is much more relationship-centric. So not necessarily success, but more premium support, more relationship-driven support, more, you know, building having the the space and the time to spend with customers. Do you do you think that's a fair assessment of of how things have changed? Sorry, that was quite a discourse, but I feel like I needed to unburden that.

Carl Lenocker 17:10

Absolutely. You know, and and I think about my team and and how large it is on some of these large clients. And you're right. I mean, I am depending on folks who are, you know, uh professional services staff OGs that are in there embedded with the customer. I've got a technical account manager, I've got a technical success engineer who, you know, is very technical and he's he's

Cost Cutting And The Outsourcing Lesson

Carl Lenocker 17:30

all about the customer's health. I've got you know different consultants that come in for different projects and contribute in different ways. Um, so I would say that, you know, there's a number of ways you could go there. Um, certainly. Uh, you know, I think that when you when you jump the shark from being a cost, you know, with an IT and being a a support person, you know, to uh being on the on the vendor side, maybe tied to revenue, you know, suddenly you'll find that your your career does have a little bit more flexibility than you may have thought in the past. And you've got some options there that you can you can look at as a as a way to grow. Because I'd been there on the help desk back, you know, early 2000 and at HP and I hit the glass ceiling. And you know, of course I went into management. And even then, you know, there was some some limitation to what I could what I could really do. And I had to I had to figure it out for myself. There wasn't a there wasn't a career path for post sale in those days. It was just kind of uh, you know, hang out and and plan to work here for 30 years and uh you know maybe we'll give you a two percent raise at the end of the year if you do well, you know.

Charlotte Ward 18:32

Right. Yeah, yeah. I think we've all been there. We've certainly all been there. Um yeah, I I I actually think I I do think it's it's somewhat exciting times in support. And I think that um we are create like I think there's the potential to move away from some of the traditional metrics. And I I think this is where I I'm interested in digging in with you this this idea of outcomes, because outcomes historically were are you meeting those targets? And what do outcomes look like for not for customer success, but for that advanced, more consultative support? Because the metrics, the balance of metrics changes significantly. There, of course, every business function is still measured, but the measures change, you know. I'm I'm even in my day job now, I'm putting um putting charts out there that show resolution times going up, which is kind of weird to me, given my 30 years of conditioning. But it's like talking to that it and and showing what that really means in terms of the value and the success of our customers is it's a it's a diff very different narrative to what I've uh historically been delivering. So so what what are the outcomes that you think we could and should be talking to now in in a modern support environment like that?

Carl Lenocker 20:00

Well, when I'm when I'm coaching folks these days at all levels and all in all roles in in enterprise software, I'm kind of coming back to the the theme of you know, we should all first of all be a business person from the get-go, right? No matter what our role is in the company, we're we're a business person and we need to understand how the business works, how the business makes money. And that ties very closely to the outcomes part of the conversation because, you know, if I'm if I'm a customer success, you know, manager or or executive, um, it's very easy for me to kind of say, okay, customers bought our product to achieve, you know, XYZ outcome. It could be to save money in these areas, it could be to make money over here, and I can measure that. You know, I can measure that over the next six to twelve months as as we move forward with the you know, adoption and enabling them and getting it stood up and getting it, you know, growing it. I can I can see how that works. But you know, what I've noticed over the years is that when I reach back to my to my partners around the support side or elsewhere, uh a lot of times we don't do a good enough job selling that story internally at our at our companies and in the business in terms of helping everyone to understand, you know, what what's the reason why you have a job? Like, you know, what is your your role when the customer calls it angry and they've got some problem, um, you know, and and you tell them that, you know, well, that's just the way the product works, sorry, and you close the ticket and you get off the call. Maybe you didn't realize that this is a customer who, you know, went through a very prescriptive sales process and someone has made a promise to them somewhere along the way that this is going to do something, and they've paid us, you know, 10, 20, 30 million dollars a year to have this. And you know, we really need you to lean in and kind of help this help this happen, right? For these reasons, because maybe the customers, you know, going to go out and and you know reform their uh retail website, e-commerce, and they you know, billions of dollars flow through this website, and this little thing that's not working right now is stopping their shopping cart from. From functioning or something, right? It's it it can get really in-depth. And I think that that's for the folks that are trying to grow their careers, and and certainly when I look back to myself, a young person in support, you know, if I'd go back and and change one thing about myself at that time, I would say, God, I wish I would have understood the business better in terms of what my role was and how it actually impacted the bottom line. Because I thought, you know, closing tickets and first point of contact resolution rate and all these things were great, and that's what was going to get me promoted. Um, but at the end of the day, it really is about understanding, you know, how your how your company makes money and how your specific role contributes to that. And if you if you have a good understanding of that and you can sell that story internally, you'll never go hungry in this business. You'll always have a path, you'll always have a future, you'll you'll always make more money.

Charlotte Ward 22:48

Yeah, and and to your point, understanding that while you're still young is a superpower. You know, I I I think that um it's it's a it and it's a hard lesson to learn, right? I I think, you know, when you first go into support, you're typically in any organization going to assume your job is to close tickets and very likely be told that your job is to close tickets, right? Um, and then at some point we kind of hit some kind of a bump in the road, which is, you know, as an escalation. The CSM swoops in and says, why didn't we do this? Or why did we do this? Or you know, customers just called me, or you know, or yeah, the CSM or me, Charlotte, the support director, and and they're really pissed off about that thing that you think you did really well because you closed the ticket quickly. And it's a bit of a uh can be a bit of a harsh awakening sometimes to realize it's not all about it's not all what you were originally told when you walked into that job. Your job is here to close, you know, learn the product and close tickets. It's more nuanced than that. And if you can learn that early on and accept it and engage with it, which I think is quite hard for people at kind of more the entry level, uh, the less tenured people, the people earlier in their careers, it's like you it feels counterintuitive, I think. You told me I have to serve customers and close tickets and do this thing over and over, you know, and get more skilled, learn the product, get faster at this thing, and yet on the other hand, it's up to the kind of the leader to some to a big degree to uh instill that kind of more balanced view, but still keep the job ro rolling, but also it's kind of a bit the onus is a little bit on the business as well, right? To to talk about what's important to them and for and for the individual to deeply understand that and take that on board and assimilate it rather than seeing it seeing it as a conflict with what they do day to day.

Carl Lenocker 24:47

Absolutely. I I mean we yeah, we sell ourselves short when we don't do a good job of kind of uh spreading that, spreading the gospel throughout the company in terms of what we're trying to do from a from a strategic level from the top. I mean, if it's you know that we're trying to grow customers or we want stability or we want you know more customers in the cloud, whatever the directive is, everyone's gotta understand what it is and kind of buy in at all levels and know what their what their role is, I think. And that's to your point, I mean, when I was on the help desk, closing tickets was my, you know, that was my my day-to-day, you know, judge of

AI And The Return Of Relationship Support

Carl Lenocker 25:20

of whether or not we were doing well as a team. And uh in reality, looking back, I mean, it I should have been a little bit more concerned of, you know, what's the value to the to the business here in terms of these people that I'm talking to. And is there is there anything more that I could have done? I'll tell you, I love it these days when a when a tech support engineer reaches out to me directly as a CSM and says, hey, I got your customer here, and they open this ticket, and I think that they actually need more, you know, more uh training on the product. Like they're they actually need to learn some things that they're they're trying to do some things over here that I don't think are right, and I want you to be aware of it because this could influence the entire deployment going forward. Like they could go way off the cliff if they continue down this road that they're on. And I I love it when people reach out and go the extra mile and and do things like that. And that's that shows up nowhere in their metrics, right? That's not going to show up anywhere.

Charlotte Ward 26:07

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 100%. The the way, the simplest way I've put that kind of or tried to coach or um encourage that kind of behavior is to really distill it to this. How do you close this ticket and the next one? And I think if I can get my support engineers thinking about, okay, this customer has this problem right in front of me right now. But what's the next thing they're going to ask? What's the next ticket they're going to file? Because that so often is shows, first of all, that you understand where they're trying to get to. But in preventing it, you often have to have the kind of conversations you've just talked about. You're engaging other people and in on the relationship side or on the product side or you know, whatever it might be, that just without without it showing up on any metrics just prevents the next ticket. Um, and it's it's a really simple it's kind of a simplified view, but if they can prevent this ticket and the next one, then I know I know they've made that customer more successful.

Carl Lenocker 27:14

Absolutely. And the impact of sales too and renewals, right? I mean, let's we've got to start ahead to those things as well. There's there's times when I've leaned on support heavily over the last couple of years to come in and save some deal that was um, you know, just off the rails and renewals coming up, and we're very unhappy, and we've, you know, we've got to bend over backwards to take care of this customer. And uh they've they've they've bailed me out. I I love support, you know, for for that reason, right? And uh again, doing things that didn't show up in their metrics. Um, so I guess it comes down to, you know, that's what a that's what management is for, you know, over there. I I hope that they're you know making notes on those things across the industry when their folks are going above and beyond and and recognizing them and you know, things like stock and and and raises and uh you know, all those things should be, you know, part of the part of the process.

Charlotte Ward 28:05

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I would love to see it across the wider business as well. You know, I'd love to your point, like CS folks, and I do see it just to be clear, but uh, you know, I love it when CS folks or or sales folks or you know, um say we had this tricky situation and this support engineer was a lifesaver, um, you know, and like got this helped help us get this deal over the line or whatever it is, like because nobody sees it all. And sometimes, you know, support folks are the kind of quiet heroes who just solve that thing just at the right moment and they're not good at advocating for themselves either. Um when we uh when we talked about this, so we've talked actually quite a lot in a kind of roundabout way um about outcomes, which which by which we really mean ongoing success of our customers one way or another, however we make those connections. Those are the outcomes. When we talked about uh this episode, we we talked about outcomes over over-optics. What do what's the over-optics part of this uh this philosophy though? The this uh this view.

Carl Lenocker 29:11

Well, you know, I think that there's there's a lot of things, you know, a lot of people in our business who manage to optics, right? They want to look good in front of the leaders. And it could be, you know, something that a friend of mine used to used to say around the office was this is called action faking versus action taking. This is when you're you're you're doing things that look good in front of the leadership, but maybe they don't actually move the needle. They don't they don't touch the bottom line in any possible way. That could be, you know, slide decks, it could be calls that could have been emails, it could be, you know, that you're uh you know, you're leading some some project that has absolutely no impact, right? And and it's just you know, trying to trying to look like you're you're a leader when you're really not. I think that that's that's another area where you know good good leadership kind of leans in and shuts those things down because we don't want folks doing busy work in in this industry and you know, kind of getting away with that. Uh it it it needs to come back to, you know, are you a business person? Do you understand the business? How how does your particular role impact the bottom line? And are you making an impact to the bottom line? And if not, we need to adjust. Um, so I I see that all the time. I mean, even at my level in the business, you know, I I coach CSMs throughout some of the biggest software companies in the industry, and they come in and talk to me about, oh, I want to do you know more, you know, QBRs with my customers. And and I'm like, why? Like, what do you what are you getting out of? First, let's let's break it down and let's make sure it's valuable to you and your customer before we just go and do this just so that you know, just because you got 50 slides and your leader thinks, oh, that's cool, but really what what are you doing? What is the impact? Like, does your customer like that? You know, are they getting value and and things like that? So that's that's actually where I see a lot of action faking these days is on the QBR side.

Charlotte Ward 31:03

Yeah, somewhat performative, isn't it? And and actually in some ways quite metrics driven, because you can say, well, you know, like you get to the end of your like end of your year and you're filing your annual review, and like you've got metrics that showed you met with customers X amount of time, and okay, you may have been relatively successful in renewals or whatever, but but ultimately the actual impact of some of those actions is rather questionable to your point. Um do you see um situations where there is conflict between two metrics or more? Like uh I I know we talked a little bit before um backstage, as it were, about uh Goodhart's

Business Outcomes As A Career Superpower

Charlotte Ward 31:50

law, which is one of my favorite, uh one of my favorite um one of my favorite laws of all time, which is you know, once a once a a me uh once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Um and I think this like I think to your point, something like conducting a certain number of QBRs is a prime example of where good art's law could manifest, right? I'm I hit that metric and and yet actually it's not needle moving. I've just hit the metric. You you you give incentivize me to do anything to check that box, I can do that. Um, and uh I think there are some really great examples of this across so many business functions, but particularly the operational ones like support. Um and there's also like conflicting uh metrics as well. You know, we talked before about serving customers on the phone in a certain amount of time. Well, I can do that, but it's actually not gonna please anyone, least of all the customer.

Carl Lenocker 32:52

Yeah. I mean, anything any activity that you incentivize, you're gonna get more of in this business, whether it's a sales rep that you're giving them double commission on one product, or if it's support and you're telling them you gotta you gotta do a QBR every quarter in order to get your MBO, like you're gonna get that if you're incentivizing it. The question is, you know, why are you incentivizing it and are you getting the outcomes that you that you're looking for? Right. So I would say on the topic of QBR specifically, the only reason to do QBRs regularly, you know, is to align the customer with our internal resources on what the outcomes are that they're trying to drive to. And then are we like where are we on that on that roadmap, right? And so while there's QBR decks out there with 50 slides, and in my experience is that there's like three slides that are really important. I mean, you've got the the business objectives, which you know, I have the customer walk us through why are these things important and where does our product or service map to their objectives? Um, maybe just a quick update slide on kind of you know accomplishments, you know, um where what's the future state, and then any risks or concerns that you have right now. And we again have the customer walk us through that and kind of get a quick glimpse and then maybe a quick asset slide, just you know, hey, here's all the things you own, here's when they renew. Do you know that we're, you know, we have these deals coming up that we need to work on? Like, and everything else is is kind of fluff in there. And um, you know, I hate to say that because when I was I was on the support side of the ballmore, you know, maybe 15 years ago, and I would do QBRs that were heavily support metric focused. You know, hey, we closed this many tickets this year, and you know, here's how many priority ones we had, and the average case was open only three days or whatever, right? Um, but I would find that, you know, executive stakeholders would get up and walk out of the room during those types of QBRs because they're like, I don't need to be here for this. Like then my technical over here will stay, but I don't there's nothing here for me, right? It doesn't speak to the to the leadership at your client. So you've got to, you know, when you're when you're doing those types of engagements, just remember that these are business people that you're sitting down with, and we need to have a business story that we're telling them. Otherwise, there's no value in it for them.

Charlotte Ward 35:06

I I I really loved your three-slide distillation of the uh uh of the QBR. Because even though you called them slides, actually, they weren't really slides, they were conversations. They were like and they were very customer-led. They were like, what are you what are you what are your hopes and dreams? What are you trying to get to, right? It wasn't like because the the the the kind of stuff that you're talking about, the support metrics that are so often served in these QBRs and everything else, the roadmap slides and all of those things. It's it's performative, isn't it? It's like here are all the things we've done to you. Uh to actually I said to you, which probably isn't is quite apt, um, done for you or are going to do for you, or here are the things we have made available to you. Um, I think that's what I was trying to say before, but but you know, it's very much um a demonstration of of all of the things we think you care about as a customer, rather than necessarily an invitation for a conversation, tell us what you want to do, where you're going, and how we can help.

Carl Lenocker 36:16

Yes, yes, 100% right. It's you know uh i I mean in in roadmap too is that's a sales exercise. So when you've got roadmap in your QBR, you're you're slamming sales down the customer's throat, maybe because we're trying to get them more, you know, at bats or more opportunities in front of the customer. But I question whether or not that should even be there. That that's probably even a separate meeting.

Charlotte Ward 36:38

So Yeah.

Optics Culture And Better QBRs

Charlotte Ward 36:40

Or or you know, even better, a um a self-explanatory public product roadmap. It comes down to like so much of that stuff that we want to serve to customers in those kind of meetings. I've done the equivalent on support reviews, which is kind of one one arm of what you described there, talking to the technical stakeholders and let's review your support experience. And I've been guilty of saying here's the tickets we sold, and here's our resolute. I've I've we've all done that, right? But but the uh the this comes down to your kind of, you know, is there a slide deck and meeting that could have been an email and an email that could have been a website that you didn't even need to like be involved in that was just a resource your customers could self-serve, you know. Um uh if you can think about how much of that stuff you're trying to kind of push at your customers, um, and how you can take it one step down on that ladder in uh and like stick what's important at the top of the ladder, which is the listening side of this rather than the rather than the performance.

Carl Lenocker 37:47

Yes, yeah, 100%. I mean it again, it comes back to the you know, being a business person, understanding the business. And the only point of of doing these types of meetings with your customers is to understand, you know, are we gonna get the renewal? Are we meeting the the tips that you've set for us and and the goals that we've outlined, and you know, or are we on track to meet them? Like that's that's it. It's not just to sit there and talk to the customer, talk at them. It's to understand where we're at then and say, okay, well, we'll meet again in three months, see if we're still on track.

Charlotte Ward 38:17

So yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Uh I think what's interesting about this um is that we can take everything we just said about QBRs and apply it to so many customer interactions. You know, um, I've done these kind of support reviews where when we're dealing with escalations as support leaders, we we should stop and listen more than we should say, this is what we've done for you. And this, you know, there's so so many so many scenarios where you can and situations where you can distill stop doing stuff to and in front of your customers and actually listen to them and understand them.

Carl Lenocker 38:55

Absolutely.

Charlotte Ward 38:56

Yeah. Um, listen, uh Carl, it's been lovely to spend some time with you today. Um, thank you so much for just, you know, meandering through the kind of idea that we can all be a bit more connected to the business. We can all actually help our our business deliver the outcomes that it wants to achieve through being better connected uh, you know, in every part of the organization and and particularly in terms of the the customer-facing parts of the organization to our customers' outcomes and caring about those rather than uh worrying about checking our own boxes, right, and delivering on our own uh our own performative metrics. Um, Carl, it's been a pleasure to spend some time with you today. Uh, thank you so much for joining me.

Carl Lenocker 39:45

Well, thank you for having me, Sherlot. It's been a pleasure. And yeah, that is that is my I guess my underlying message from the customer success side of the business to our support leaders listening is I just love love you know the business side of things. And uh clearly you can tell from my excitement talking about um how how folks you know should all think of themselves as business people first. I I think that that applies to all aspects of the post-sale side of the business. And you know, it can only it can only serve folks who are looking to grow their careers and move up and and onward throughout the business.

Charlotte Ward 40:15

So yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Carl, thank you so much. Would you come back and join me for another conversation sometime?

Carl Lenocker 40:23

Well, I would absolutely love to. Absolutely. And um, I don't know if we should tell readers about or listeners about my book that Oh, we absolutely should.

Charlotte Ward 40:31

We absolutely should. We absolutely should. And I'm sorry I neglected to mention it at the start, but then so did you. So so let's do that now.

Carl Lenocker 40:38

That's okay. I'm I'm very humble about it at this point, but I've got a I've got a book out, it's called Success Plan for Life. You can find it on Amazon and Audible at Successplanforlife.com. And it's kind of the gritty underdog story of my growing up in Silicon Valley. I was born to uh, you know, a very poor family. Actually, my dad was a soldier on his third marriage when he brought my mother home from England after he was deployed there for a period of time. And uh, you know, they were kind of starting over with nothing. And and so I literally hit the ground with absolutely nothing. And over the course of my career in

Carl’s Book And Closing Thoughts

Carl Lenocker 41:10

enterprise software and the tech industry, uh I created uh a multi-million dollar net worth for myself and uh have uh you know two young daughters who just graduated college that are you know out there in the world selling now in the enterprise software world that I'm so proud of. And I've got so many stories in the book on you know what it was like to grow up at HP in those early days and kind of how to, you know, make moves throughout your your career in terms of building relationships and who are the people that can help you get to the next level. And uh it's just a really cool read. And it's it's not really about customer success, it's about family and relationships and setting goals for yourself and um you know how anybody can do it if they just put together a plan.

Charlotte Ward 41:50

So yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for reminding me and uh reminding me of my neglecting not mentioning it earlier in the podcast. Um but I know we talked about this the other day, and actually we shared uh we shared some some war stories to some degree because you and I are of similar age and look equally good despite the battle scars. Um and uh uh yeah, so I was at Oracle about the time you were at HP, and you know, yeah, really learning like cutting our teeth there, right? Um in that kind of environment when when software and technology was really going through that first big boom and uh lots to your point, so many lessons could carry over into day-to-day life and in all of our relationships. So, so thank you so much for that reminder. Um, and uh yeah, very excited to to go and have a read myself. So thank you. Thank you again. I I will repeat my invitation to come back and talk to me about maybe success plans for life or um anything else you want to talk about. Thank you so much.

Carl Lenocker 42:54

My pleasure. Thanks again, Charlotte.

Charlotte Ward 42:59

That's it for today. Go to customer supportleaders.com forward slash three zero six for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.