How we used Customer Support to build $9m Bootstrapped

“so you know after this this unfortunate experience with the vendor we were using and realizing that we needed to find other technology to help facilitate the event and end up building out something to use for this first event and frankly it just it worked we got great feedback from the attendees from the organization that we put the event on and from there my buddy and I we decided to build a business around this so for the first uh four to five years here we were both working full-time in building this”

“infrastructure and org structure so this is um a interesting chart that Scott Brinker from HubSpot published a couple of weeks ago but I think it really hits the nail on the head here so he's talking about markdeck but I think this is applicable across frankly a lot of uh Enterprise Tech it's this idea that the last decade was really focused on SAS as we know it right build it one sold a thousand times but as that's happened technology has”

“trying to accomplish and it led to a much faster product Innovation cycle and then we also had a direct line of communication between our CX team and our engineering team so that the engineering team would get brought in immediately into every circumstance that warranted it and we could just get things revolved resolved much much faster so thinking about uh you know what else we went through from uh looking at this from a financial perspective we chatted with a lot of VCS over the past two years and when they would start to dig”

“company for the customer you're going to be recognized for that and that was just one of the mechanisms that we had in place to ensure that people were being recognized for their efforts you can also see here the significance of our CX team as a percentage of our headcount allocation so it made up 27 of our uh of our total headcount marketing was only four percent we only had uh yeah between three and five marketing people throughout the duration of this period we really relied”

“recognize each of those folks in their contributions to the business so with that um I'm going to wrap up and just you know share a little bit more we we really found a way to make customer experience that 10x feature for us and again it's not going to work if the product's not there but if you've got a great product it's an incredible way to make sure that you get people over that Cliff that you get that product adoption and that you're encouraging the the”

“While 6 competitors raised a cumulative $1.6 BILLION… We made Customer Experience a 10x feature.”

“What does a great experience feel like? Sub 30 second response times Extension of your team (resident expert) Honesty - what can and can’t we do Innovative solutions (brain trust) Proactive approach - surpassing expectations”

“How are you unlocking value for customers? Onboarding Training & Education Consulting Services Customer Events “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” 87% logo retention vs. 16% for competitors.”

“What Happened CX department had a 15% profit margin We placed a bet. CX Profitability Mitigate Churn Accelerate Product 87% logo retention vs. 60% industry average. Create customer relationships to drive product innovation”

“Customer Experience ≠ Support Build systems that ensure a consistent experience. Monitor → Test → Fix → Replace. Customer Experience ≉ Support Document & Train Be proactive Celebrate wins & Hire Within Support waits for a customer problem. Customer Experience seeks opportunities to help customers. Treat your CX team like heroes and celebrate wins together. Treat your employees the way you want them to treat your customers”