Don MacLennan from Bluenose Analytics: Strengths in Action #03
Welcome to the third episode of the Strengths in Action podcast.
In this episode, I chat to Don MacLennan, CEO at Bluenose Analytics and learn:
- How and why Don founded Bluenose
- Don’s frustrations, challenges and the dark side of growing a company from scratch
- and why Don thinks of himself as an old dog who loves to learn new tricks…
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Nils:
Welcome to the show. I’m joined here with my guest Don MacLennan, CEO of Bluenose Analytics. Don, how are you doing today?
Don:
I’m doing. It’s so great to be talking to you Nils.
Nils:
Yeah, same here man. Super excited about our conversation today. Don, you’re a CEO of Bluenose. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what Bluenose is and what you’re up to today?
Don:
Sure. I’m the co-founder of Bluenose. We get started back in 2013 with a very clear mission which is to help businesses do a better job of retaining and growing their existing customers.
Nils:
That was a pretty important thing in early times in SAS and as company that are trying to retain and grow their customers. What did you find as you went to market with that mission? What was out there?
Don:
Initially, I think we focused on the customer success department as a pretty obvious and natural audience for our capabilities. I think over the course of our journey, what we found is the market really wanted to buy from us capabilities that would enable customer success managers to do a better job of managing their assigned accounts on a day to day basis. Susie might have 70 assigned accounts, Bob might have 80, and they kind of looking for the key pieces of information and signals that help them know when and how to engage. You could argue we were building a CRM albeit powered by a different type of data than you might see in a sales CRM. The technology of the sales CRM is all about track and to follow, and you declare victory when you have a closed one opportunity at least in a B2B world.
That doesn’t really translate in terms of data to what you needed to know about your existing customers. Obviously there’s some revenue data like when did they buy, what did they buy, when did they renew? There are many, many other signals of customer health that matter more to customer success managers than you might find in a sales oriented CRM. That was kind of the first incarnation of Bluenose that we started with in 2013.
Nils:
Interesting. Are you still pushing on that front or where are you today?
Don:
Yes and no. What hasn’t change in the least is the mission. We still exist to help companies grow and retain existing customers. We still really want to use the appropriate data for that to occur. What we’re probably more focused on in the recent past is enabling other channels of engagement than the daily work of a customer success manager specifically in application. For example, we’re marketing a survey tool where you can fire up a little NPS survey tool right in the application; so that you’re collecting user feedback while they’re in the midst of using your product. We’re also working on the email channel, so kind of thinking about marketing automation metaphors like campaigns and sequences of emails, but now directed at nurturing users and their adaption journey, as opposed to prospects and their sales journey or purchase journey because market really doesn’t have a robust set of capabilities there.
In some respects, I think the way that we’re currently building products supplements our customer success managers do their daily work. Presumably they’re not finding the time, and hours in a day to get to every single end user and nurture them individually. That’s a scale problem. Their time is generally more spent with their key stakeholders on the customer side of relationship. We’re building capability that would complement or supplement that as opposed to what we kind of started with which was more of a workflow driven tool that they would use themselves to kind of model their key tasks, and activities, and alerts, and data in their daily work. What we found is that’s probably less of a direct connection with some of our technology DNA which is really, really, really deep with respect to our ability to measure and make sense of individual users, behavior, or feedback, and the like.
Nils:
Interesting. The workflow tool towards now supplementing the actions that CSMs can take to nurture their customers in one and many bases?
Don:
Yup.
Nils:
It sounds like a pretty big shift. Can you just give us the high level of what drove that particular direction and why the change to complement as opposed to be a workflow tool?
Don:
What hasn’t changed even in our technology is the underlying technologies that we utilized had been the same all along, and we get to reuse this with these newer apps that we’re building. In others we’ve been able for a long time to be able to collect and house lots of different data about an individual from their usage data, to all the history of activities that had been performed with them such as emails that were sent and the like, survey responses, and so forth. It’s always been the case that we’ve found our underlying technology capable of housing data that’s right down to the individual user and profiling them specifically. What’s different is, difficult apps on top of the platform. We get to reuse a lot of technology that we’ve been building all along but for a slightly different use case. What drove us to that probably or a couple experiences that we had, the first which is we were seeing pretty consistently that people had significant data quality issues with their sales force data.
If you’re trying to capture definitive information about the account that you’re assigned to, we were being asked to integrate with sales force and pull all that data into our cloud. What we found pretty consistently was a very poor quality. Often there are many gaps in the data. We had the unhappy experience of starting to implement our product only to surface these issues with our customers, because then they would have to figure out like how to go fix that and delay the implementation. It really was like a long time to value and that’s all like a tough business to be in because it wasn’t within our means to fix those data quality issues. The customer had to do it for themselves. If nothing else, I just think it’s an indicator for really early market for that class of tools because of the data was used in business applications. Typically it would be a very high quality. We won’t be having this conversation in 3 years’ time as a result. The market will have matured and it will always take good care of itself. For the here and now, that was a pretty barrier to adaption.
The other thing we saw and I know you all have written about is there’s a lot of flavors of customer success. If you start with the workflow based approach and you’re trying to model every workflow of every team that does customer success, you’re going to be exposed to a very high variety of how people approached it. Even from a CSM ratio, if one CSM has 10 assigned accounts versus 200, their engagement, that looks like radically different. We didn’t find a tremendous amount of consistency in terms of how people are doing this. Again, a hallmark of a really early market. That will all kind of come into focus later. We’ll probably see some standardization if you will around the best practices of how you do account management or customer success. There’s a lot of change happening and a lot of fluidity with respect to our customers’ business requirements that are presented to us. Workflow didn’t feel at the time like the ingredients of kind of a successful application.
Nils:
Certainly. I know there’s a lot of CS leaders out there who had a big smile in their face when you said in a couple of years’ time we probably won’t be seeing and dealing with nearly as much on the data called the issues side because that’s a common one that I hear all the time about the challenges of integrating with a third party system. [inaudible 00:07:24] customer success is that the data has to be clean and good in order to use it and that oftentimes is a challenge.
Don:
We all kind of we’re attached to the Silicon Valley ecosystem being SAS vendors or companies that service SAS vendors. It’s really easy to think that these markets move super fast. Therefore, just here in 2016, “Oh my gosh, it’s been years since these tools were introduced.” Surely this isn’t a mature market, but the reality is really early days. It will be many more years in the making until those data quality issues are put to bed and you see some consistency in the workflows and how customer success teams go about their work.
Nils:
That’s a really great point. No matter what, we’re all in an early stage which is a good mindset to have too.
Don:
Yup.
Nils:
Becoming the CEO and co-founder of Bluenose, maybe you can give me a little script on how you got to be where you are today. What were some of the key things that happened that led you to ultimately founding Bluenose and doing this work today?
Don:
I’m certainly motivated to solve a problem of my professional past because I was holding leadership roles and things like marketing, and product management, and to make informed decisions about the roadmap. You need to know what your customers are doing with your product. What I found is in my prior roles of 2 or 3 companies in a row, I had really limited visibility in the key information about my customers, and how they consumed the product itself. In one case, I had to go to the trouble of building a data science team from scratch which took me about 2 years and millions of dollars’ worth of people costs and infrastructure costs-
Nils:
Wow!
Don:
… to be able to understand our customers in more complete terms. That felt like a really hard and long journey to build that capability up.
Nils:
Hang on there. What was going on prior to the decision to build that team? What were the specific issues and challenges that you faced and how did you come up with the idea that maybe I need to build a data science team in order to get all that stuff?
Don:
I got hired as a head product for a company that at the time was gearing up for an IPO. What they wanted to be able to tell Wall Street was that they were successfully diversifying the business by having new products to sell which would create headroom for growth. Therefore an investor would be believing that there’s the opportunity for this business to grow many times over in the future and want to buy the stock. The reason they hire me was we’re going to have to get from a single-product company largely to a portfolio of products, and cross-sell, and upsell that portfolio against the user base that we’ve already worked really hard and successful to get. In this case, it was like 120 million users.
I arrived and began to do that, meaning figure out where the kind of complementary products that could form a suite. We began to acquire start-ups and build that out along with some organic development. At the same time I realized we had a huge return problem. There wasn’t going to be any cross-sell or up sell if we couldn’t keep our users around for very long to expose them to these other offers. As I began to unpack that, what I came to realize is that we had almost no visibility into those customer relationships, or at best the data was scattered amongst a bunch of systems that were operating in silos. I wasn’t hired to do this but I began to build up kind of our data science and analytics capabilities.
Nils:
Got it, while you were solving a problem? This sounds like as you say it.
Don:
Oh yeah. I was absolutely solving a problem.
Nils:
Okay. Take me back to the early part of your career. Where did you get your first foothold in the professional world out of school? What were you doing? What was the focus and how did you end up there?
Don:
I started my career in Enterprise Sales with software products. I like to say that I was a 22-year-old snot-nosed kid trying to sell general ledgers to chief financial officers in Fortune 500 companies; and not very successful at it by the way.
Nils:
Yeah, how was that experience? That’s tough at no matter what age to sell into that market, but give me a recount. Any more stories or anyone that stands out in particular that kind of highlights the challenges that you went through there?
Don:
Oh man, a whole lot of failure and not a lot of success. It’s like there’s nothing else than just taught me how little I knew.
Nils:
Which was incredibly valuable right?
Don:
Yeah.
Nils:
What was it about sales that drove you into that in the first place?
Don:
I was really interested in technology. I didn’t want to be a programmer. If you’re interested in technology and you don’t want to program computers, then my thought process is, “Well, I could do customer support which is help customers use these products well and not felt like too close to the technology.” Sales felt more natural. It felt like a better fit. I started my career in Enterprise Sales, did that for 7 or 8 years, moved into flavors of sales like business development and alliances to kind of understand the other facets of how you get to market along with your part or ecosystem and did that for a while. Probably let’s see, 12 years on ended up in the marketing role of all things. Really because in my business development experience, I’ve figured out how to lead company and send to new verticals.
I’d experienced probably 2-3 times in a row of selling the first customer in a new industry vertical for a company that was otherwise selling somewhere else. That was like a lot of imagination to take a product that you knew to be relevant to one business type and then figure out how it might be relevant to completely different industry. It was both creative and like a really tough kind of intellectual assignment. As I got good at it, people sort of started to see some marketing skills in that. The things you begin in marketing to think about target markets, segmentation of markets, etc., etc.
Nils:
All the way down to messaging, and positioning, and the words used to describe it? That was what your skills you were developing?
Don:
Yeah. Exactly right.
Nils:
Got it.
Don:
Instead of doing it for myself and my “territory”, I was being asked to do it for the sake of the company.
Nils:
Cool.
Don:
That was kind of a segue into product management which I began to do in 2002, and did product management at varying degrees of responsibility and scale all the way up to founding Bluenose.
Nils:
Okay. Enterprise Sales in the business development, into marketing, into product management, ultimately into founding a SAS start-up in San Francisco?
Don:
You got it.
Nils:
Fascinating, okay cool. Looking at that track there, I’m curious about the themes in your career. We’ve touched on a couple of them but I’m really curious first about where you have feel like you have excel? Then second, where you feel you have struggled?
Don:
Sure. I mean it’s kind of 2 sides of 1 coin because whenever I excel, that is really taking on a huge diversity of assignments and being pretty adaptable. I love to learn and I love new challenges, and probably I’m pretty easily bored. We’ve talked about the various types of roles I played from sales, to sales management, to the staff, to channels and alliances, to marketing, department management, and more like executive roles in the recent past. I also did that for many different sizes of companies from pre-revenue, to late-stage start-up, through 2 IPOs, all the way to working at times for SAP and EMC, some of the largest tech companies. All stages of tech companies and their lifecycle and even across sectors. I’ve worked in software quality automation, field service automation, CRM, ERP, supply chain, customer analytics, security. I’ve never got up and tied to one product category by the virtue of what it does. That’s a lot of variety in that period of time.
Nils:
Let me stop you there for a second. That is a lot of variety, and a lot of different industries, and a lot of different expertise that you gathered along the way. I’m curious, was there a particular path that was driving you to get all the experience to these different areas? What was really driving you in going across so many different spots, and different products, and different technologies, companies?
Don:
Probably just the enjoyment of learning something that’s very new. I’m trying to get this on level of competence or capability.
Nils:
Okay. When you got to the level of confidence or capability, then you still had the drive to go and learn something completely new and start all over?
Don:
Yeah. Usually. I think the past just, the pattern is such that I’ve tended to tear up whatever I’ve succeeded out in the recent past and start something all over again.
Nils:
That’s an awesome thing to know. Was there a particular point like even early in your career or even earlier than you started working professionally where you kind of had the sense that doing one thing for a long period of time just wasn’t going to cut it? You were always looking for new stuff. When was the first time you remember thinking like, “Okay, I’ve done this for a while. I’m good at this. This is boring.”
Don:
Probably about 6 years into my career because by then, I had proven that I could be successful as a salesperson.
Nils:
Okay.
Don:
The story was I’d work for a company for about 5 years in a row. By year 5, I was setting all the sales records. I did 450% of my quota by-
Nils:
Wait a second. When you talk first like this was the first company out of school right? Where you started at the Enterprise-
Don:
Second.
Nils:
Okay. You started out, didn’t know anything, and within 4 or 5 years you were top producing sales rep exceeding targets and setting all the rules?
Don:
Yeah. The company that I’m referring to I was there from about age 25 to 30. The company itself had been around for a very long time. It’s certainly had a legacy of customers and salespeople and the like as opposed to being really new. I don’t want to say, it was about 20 or $30 million business that I was part of. The records that I was setting meant something to me because I was achieving something that exceeded those who had gone before me.
Nils:
What was it that made you different? How did you achieve that? How did you look at things differently or what were you doing different than everybody else?
Don:
I came to realize 2 things that probably set in motion the change in my career. The first of which is I really wasn’t driven by relationships. I like to think of myself as a moderately extroverted person and probably wouldn’t be doing the job I am today. It doesn’t mean that that was keys to my sales success. As if I would memorize all the names and birthdates of your children and develop that degree of rapport. That absolutely is a winning formula for some people in the professional sales, no doubt. I don’t say it out of disrespect. That wasn’t what was motivating and driving me to want to be successful in the role of sales. What I was really wanting to do is practice what we now think of as a challenger sale which is really learn the business well enough to begin to ask very provocative questions about the business in a very specific capabilities about how I could help the business. That meant that I needed to know something about every perspective company that I was ever going to sell to.
I tended to focus on larger companies in navigating really complex work charts and kind of creating an insider advantage to myself having more contacts, and more networks, and more insider knowledge. I got really good at it to the point where I was getting frequent feedback from perspective customers that I was telling them something about their business they didn’t already know. I learned it from somewhere else in their business.
Nils:
Interesting.
Don:
It’s kind of fun. I think that was also the ingredients for wanting to try something else because it was more for the fun of the exercise than this is something I wanted to live with for a very long period of time. I kind of proved to myself I could do it. I left that company in the year that I had already made 450% of my quota knowing that in the following year I was probably going to have a really good year as well. Most salespeople will never walk away from a territory where they’re going to pretty easily meet their goals. Instead, I sent an email cold to a guy named Reed Hastings. At the time, he was the founder and CEO of a company in Sunnyvale called Pure Software. I was living in Boston.
I said, “Hey Reed, I wondering if you’ve got channels and alliances program going because I’d be really interested to help you get one off the ground.” Completely cold, I had never done it before by the way. I was kind of interested to know what that was all about. He responded to my email and hooked me up with the incoming VP of sales who he just hired. I ended up working for them. That completely changed the nature of my role and in some respects I never looked back as if I was going to go back into sales because just like took on my new set of challenges and things to learn that probably propelled me forward to this day.
Nils:
That’s fascinating I mean. You achieved 450% of quota, had next year probably teed up to do exceptionally well and you ripped all that up. Send a cold email and started a completely new role that you had never done before but wanted to learn and had an idea.
Don:
Yeah. Probably stupid in retrospect at least when it comes to money but-
Nils:
Hey, [inaudible 00:21:32] but it was fun, right? You were following what you were naturally talented to do which we’re going to get into more here in little bit.
Don:
You’ve asked about the downside.
Nils:
That was what I was going next. Tell me about the struggles, the dark times? What was the challenge?
Don:
It probably relates to playing the role of CEO. When I started my career, I was looking at what CEOs were doing and I talked to myself, “My God, I would never want that job.” Because they’re just the subject of so much scrutiny and focus as the leader. Then sort of probably 10 years in the make here, I started toying with it. “Well, was it really mean to be a CEO? Could I be one of those too?” I think it probably was not until my mid-30s that I actually decided that that’s what I wanted for myself. There is a long period of time when it was my stated objective. It kind of finally grew into wanting it. This kind of weird path that I’ve been telling you about, is not a traditional path to get there.
Most CEOs come up through functional leadership. The classic example is you become a sales rep. You have success. Now you’re a sales manager right up a small team. You do that well, now you’re VP of sales. Then you’re the SVP of sales and the like. Then you tend to specialize in that function at increasing levels of responsibility, and ultimately become CEO by graduating from the sales leadership role into the CEO role. Sometimes it happens out of the technology function like the CTO. Sometimes it happens out of finance, less in our industry but certainly in others. Most CEOs have a very long history of performing one function very, very well. I couldn’t be more different than that blueprint.
I think it probably meant that it’s been a much longer journey for me to reach that but I’m a very different CEO as a result of the diversive experiences I have. I’ll be probably more well-rounded and yet the jury is out as to whether I can translate that into real business success. Still, I think that’s been a downside with respect to me fulfilling my career ambition because I have not been on a traditional path.
Nils:
That’s very interesting and going from the point in which you’ve decided that CEO was the right track. When was the right place you want it to be or you’ve set it as a goal? There were still lots of other opportunities that you continued to pursued that didn’t directly relate to that. You could have gone back to sales and business development and risen through the ranks right, but you didn’t?
Don:
Yup.
Nils:
You went on to do product managing, went on to do marketing, went on to do other pieces, and then ultimately get to that seat. What impacted that not achieving that? Like when you set it as a goal, what impacted that have on you on a kind of day to day and even year to year basis where you think, “Well, I’m not really doing what I’ve set out to do. What’s wrong here?”
Don:
I think that’s probably frustrating for me and my wife to be honest.
Nils:
Tell me more about the frustration.
Don:
Because the tension between wanting the job but not being patient enough to stay in a given role to get your boss’s job, and then your boss’s boss’s job in order to then be positioned to be that CEO. I would be impatient in the given role that I was playing. You can kind of look at it as a 2- to 3-year clock in which case I’d be wanting something new, or different, or more. That’s the challenge because if you are a little bit more patient, and stick to that role, and ride it up through the organizational ranks, I may have had a more direct path to what I’m now doing. I mean that’s all hindsight, but I think that was the tension that I was experiencing for a good many years.
Nils:
Did that tension have negative impacts on you? How big of a challenge was it dealing with that tension?
Don:
It certainly creates change in the sense of you got to decide which one of those you’re going to resolve because you can’t just sort of sit there and be frustrated every day and not act on it. At least I found that that wasn’t easy for me. I had greater inclination to act on my frustration or dissatisfaction by moving on to some new assignment which was always fun because of the learning that came with it. I think there was a period where I would probably went through 2 or 3 jobs in succession where I could have stayed and stayed much longer, versus sought the next new opportunity. That was a fresh source of stimulus.
Nils:
Got it. That rings true certainly on my side too that enjoying the learning and enjoying the path sometimes is more important than the patience to get to a destination of which you have previously determined.
Don:
Yup.
Nils:
That’s oftentimes a pull which actually gets into the next question which is your philosophy around personal development. What are the keys things that have stuck with you and even the people that have worked for you, you’ve mentored, etc., makes a sense of that?
Don:
I have a very strong opinion about this and that is that you own your personal development. That nobody else can be responsible for it. It’s not your boss’s job to develop you. It’s not your employer’s job to develop you. It’s your responsibility to decide what it is that you want to learn next and how to achieve that. In many cases, your boss and your employer can play a really important facilitating role but not even in all cases. I’ll give you another story. I referred to being hired by this company to take this product leadership role. We’re pre-IPO and we’re trying to diversify the product portfolio. My job was build up our product management team, just kind of guide that. Guide the process of figuring out the roadmap, the portfolio, how to integrate it, etc., etc.
This was in Prague in the Czech Republic. I’d moved my family from Boston to take this assignment. I land in Czech Republic, and now my responsibility is go build the team. I started looking around for experience product managers to hire. Unlike in the United States, they don’t exist in the Czech Republic. If you know the history of the country, they’re obviously controlled by the Soviet regime for many, many, many years. What that did mean is lots and lots of people had STEM-related degrees; in science, math, engineering, computer science and the like because that was absolutely permissible under the communist era. That was what they would value. The workforce in Czech Republic had really, really good technical talent. Business leadership talent not so much because there was no legacy of capitalism let alone a mature tech industry.
There was nobody in the Czech Republic to hire that had product management experience. Instead, what we had to figure out was what were the ingredients of a successful product manager where we could teach them the process of how to do it, effectively turn them into product managers. Through a lot of trial and error, we landed on a couple. One of which relates to personal development. We began to interview candidates by asking them what are you learning or what are you reading?
Nils:
Great question.
Don:
When someone said, “I love to read, but I love fiction.” It’s like, “Okay, well it’s great that you love to read but what you read doesn’t play a particularly specific role in helping you develop as a professional.” In contrast from time to time, we would get this stunning answers about what people are doing in a self-directed learning. We were interviewing the head of user experience design as a new hire. I said, “So what are you learning?” He goes, “Actually, I’m pursuing 2 courses of study on my own. I’m [out learning a 00:29:58] finance class.” I said, “That’s interesting. Why are you doing that?” “I want to understand how improvements and user experience can be translated into financial benefit for my own company. I need some basic financial literacy to be able to connect the dots and prove the value of what I do.” I’m like, “Wooh! That’s really cool.”
Nils:
Yeah.
Don:
Then I said, “What’s the other thing you’re studying?” He goes, “I’m also out learning a course in ergonomics.” “I’m like ergonomics? Really, why that?” “Because well, if I design interfaces, then I have to understand how the body interacts with the devices that people are using to interact with my interface like a mouse. I’m interested to see and use a mouse of what constitutes an easy usage experience when you’re holding a mouse versus heart.” “Wow!”
Nils:
Did you hire him on the spot?
Don:
Absolutely. When we kind of stumbled on this formula, I used it retrospectively to look at the 50 some of my people that were working for me by then. That factor and one other which was what we termed the global mindset which is somebody who has purposely exposed themselves, to lots and lots of other experiences, and other cultures. If we saw somebody that have traveled abroad, lived abroad, worked abroad, coupled with self-directed learning as a pattern where they could prove it by way of example, then those 2 ingredients were highly predictive of their successive value to the company.
Nils:
Interesting.
Don:
Back to the question you asked about learning. It’s about self-directed learning and really understanding what it is you’re trying to do, and taking responsibility for it, and being transparent with your boss and your company as to where you want to go so that they can play a role of enabling you. Sometimes, what you want to learn next is a skill set. It may or may not pick a path with the company you work for.
Nils:
Yeah, that’s a great point.
Don:
That’s something you have to have the courage to confront.
Nils:
If you were to give a piece of advice to someone who says, “Okay, I get it that I’m in charge of my own professional development here. However, I don’t know what it is that I’m most interested in. I like just doing lots of stuff.” What advice would you give them, reflecting back on your experience, and expertise, and all the learning you have done. What advice would you give them to give some direction as far as how to go about figuring out where to focus next, or how to go about discovering what they should focus on? That sometimes can be a blocker between I know I should be doing learning something but I don’t know exactly what? There’s this gap there. What would you tell someone in that situation?
Don:
It depends. Let’s talk about the audience that is probably going to listen to this conversation in customer success land. I think as individual contributors because we certainly know customer success has lots and lots of people who are young in their careers and as individual contributors just trying to figure that out. Customer success somehow feels right to them for the time being. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to figure out your career path. I think customer success is a natural magnet to people who don’t yet know what they want to do just because in itself are role of a tremendous amount of variety.
Nils:
Yes.
Don:
Think about what it takes to be successful. You’ve got to be the main expert in what your product is enabling. You have to be technically sufficient to understand your product to advise customers to use it well. You have to be a good relationship manager. You have to be a good negotiator. You have to be a good lobbyist inside your own company to others to help your cause. There’s a really interesting mix of skills that comprise the customer success role that you may not get in any other job that may seem less multifaceted. It’s a pretty darn good place to start while you work to figure it out. What I would say though is when someone is now in the role of leading customer success, and we’ve often seen you and I first hand that an early customer success hires an individual contributor becomes the leader of the function.
Nils:
Yes.
Don:
Team leader, departmental lead. I think at that point that increased responsibility and authority is now time to really take stack of the skills that you have versus the skills you need to have because being an individual contributor, and a successful one at that, doesn’t by itself enable you to be an effective manager and leader. There’s a whole other collection of skills that need to be develop that just you guys start working on that it don’t come for free.
Nils:
Yeah. If that is a direction that you want to go in the leadership side, right? Sometimes that can be a misnomer, “Oh, in order to keep progressing, I have to become a manager.” It’s like, “No, that’s not necessarily the case.” There is a whole different skill set that comes with being a manager, being a leader especially not only a team but in an entire department or organization as well.
Don:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nils:
Got it.
Don:
The reason I used that example is I think as a first time leader, you really do have to have a clear development plan in order to be effective in the role. Whereas an individual contributor, I think you could be kind of intuitively successful with the skills you bring to the table.
Nils:
Agree. Don, what makes you unique?
Don:
Oh gosh! I really do like to learn. I just derived tremendous stimulation and satisfaction from learning new things. I’m 51, so I’m an old dog who loves to learn new tricks. I’m probably older than your average listener. I got to tell you, the person who inspires me, I won’t name him because I don’t want to embarrassment him. He’s 65 years old and he’s been kind of a serial entrepreneur/investor. I suspect he’s made enough money to be comfortable and not have to do anything. He retired, but instead he’s trying to bring his knowledge of the tech industry to launch an entirely new shampoo brand where the shampoo has a radically new scientific formulation; like literally they’ve got patented molecules supposed to make your hair better. For women especially, particularly those who would color their hair, they care a lot about the quality of the shampoo that they use.
Apparently, there’s idea there that this is a truly new innovative shampoo product. He got so excited about it that he stepped in as a CEO, and he’s trying to build a direct-to-consumer business online to market this thing. He’s asking me questions about marketing automation, and clickstream tools, and e-commerce, and [DemandGen 00:36:43] and all these things that he sort of was conceptually aware of but he had never than himself. It’s just amazing to me that somebody of his age is putting himself into a place or a role where he has very, very low level of confidence in many, many things. Now obviously, he’s a very experienced leader and brings much to the table, but he’s doing something he’s never done before. It’s very inspiring. As you might imagine, the guy doesn’t look or act his age. It’s 65 going on 35.
Nils:
Yeah, exactly.
Don:
A really fun, interesting guy to be around. That’s kind of inspirational to me in terms of like he never stop learning. What I would say is particular in the time when I’ve spent time in larger companies that are a little bit more stable, I’ve observed a lot of people that are kind of are mid-career. They get pretty stale to be honest. It’s natural. You have kids. You get married. All of a sudden your financial needs are kind of ratchet it up. You get a house. You get a mortgage. You get things to pay for. You got a retirement, kids, college education, and you become kind of professionally conservative because you’re banking on that high paying corporate job and in middle management. I’ve definitely seeing people fall into the trap where they’re playing that same role year on, year on, year on. They’re not developing new skills because they’re not taking risk. They’re really motivated by risk aversion. The challenge is that for some reason, that job has to end through lay off or otherwise. You can find yourself in late stages of your career without current skills which [inaudible 00:38:33] place to be.
Nils:
Awesome. Your friend sounds like a fascinating person, an inspiration. It makes a lot of sense in your history. That’s really cool to hear. Where do you get the most satisfaction in your work today?
Don:
Yeah. There are probably 2 areas. One is learning. I mean that’s just learn, learn, learn. It’s just so much fun to learn new stuff and figure it out. I think the other is to have my team win, to have people be successful to what they do, learn new skills, grow professionally, and for me to play the role of facilitating that.
Nils:
What specifically does it do for you when your team learns new skills and you get to play that facilitation role? What does that do for you?
Don:
Oh man, it makes you all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s just a great gift. I think I had the benefit of being a little later in my career where I can probably extrapolate. What does it mean for that person to have mastered that skill in terms of the opportunities that they would be exposed to? I have an individual on my team right now where because we’re so small, and have such scarce resources, I’ve asked them to take on a role which you probably called DevOps for lack of better term; helping to deploy and manage our infrastructure on which our product runs. He’s never done that before. He has the right background. Meaning he has the technical training but he’s not actually ever played that role. He’s been in unbelievable learning curve for the last few months. I’m sure I’ve probably caused him undue stress from tons of time, fun to grow into the role.
Nils:
That’s where growth comes from, right?
Don:
I know through sort of asking others about him that he’s also really, really engaged, and really, really happy. It’s generally good stress versus not. I know something that he might not know which is the role of DevOps is an incredibly hot job with very, very scarce people who are well trained in it. Whatever comes after Bluenose, he’s going to have an unbelievable career opportunity that he didn’t have in hand when he joined us. Thanks to this. I win because he’s doing a great job and he’s getting the job done. He wins because he’s going to develop a new set of skills that he didn’t previously have. Not there are technical in this case, but not all skills needed to be technical. Sometimes it’s back to our conversation a few minutes ago. It’s a set of soft skills related to perhaps being a leader or manager. In this case he’s learning technical skills and are very marketable. In other cases, it’s something else.
Nils:
Always learning, always growing, individually as well as a company. That’s really wonderful to seeing that it gives you the warm and fuzzies inside. I like that. What would you say you are personally most talented to do?
Don:
Probably strategy. If I roll back the clock about 15 years, I got some executive coaching. The person who was my coach as you often do when you’re into one of these processes does a whole bunch of diagnosis before figuring out the prescription, so to speak. I was struggling to grow into a leadership role at the time. He ran a whole battery of diagnostic survey-type tests and it said, “You know, you’re an individual who probably represents only about 2 to 4% of the population.” I’m like, “That’s interesting.”
Nils:
How so?
Don:
He said, “Well, you think at a very specific way which is you’re really good at extrapolation. In other words, you know that if A equals B, and B could C, and C can leads D, then you can get all the way to O in terms of thinking through how that might play out in the future. How a market might evolve or how a trend might materialize.” He said so, “You’re really good at doing that. You can think in very abstract terms and be very comfortable with the ambiguity that naturally comes with making an assumption, built on assumption, built on assumption.” He said, “Unfortunately because so few people think the way you think, they can’t keep pace with you. They’re still worried about how did you get from A to B.”
There’s many things I can’t do, but one of the things I can do is thinking this way that lends itself this strategic planning, because I could potentially create a business plan and that might last a year, or 2, or 3, and still have some assumptions underpinning it that would prove to be reliable years later. I know this because I’ve done strategic planning for prior companies in which case I know some of the things I laid the groundwork for actually did end up materializing. I have a little bit of proof of [crosstalk 00:43:31]. I’m pretty good at strategy. Now the challenge is that strategy isn’t worth a crap until you execute to it.
Nils:
Yes. [inaudible 00:43:41] you can be the best strategist in the world but if you can’t execute it, it doesn’t mean much.
Don:
Totally. [inaudible 00:43:49] good dependency which is I need to surround myself with teams that both buy into the strategy. That’s my job to communicate why it is what it is and trust me as their leader, but I also need people who really know how to link strategy, execution, and execute well because that’s probably my blind spot.
Nils:
That’s interesting. That gets this to a very interesting point about the strengths overall and individual strengths, right. You recognize or got some coaching which is wonderful. You got some coaching to help identify where you were, had your strengths in the strategic side, and being able to extrapolate and draw those things all the way from A to O. You also then understood how to build a team around you that could complement those strengths. That seems to be one of the most important things in leadership is understanding one, what you’re naturally talented to do because everybody’s brain is inspired to work in a certain way. Then 2, how to fill the gaps with the rest of the people on your team.
Don:
Yeah.
Nils:
When you were working with your teams and you would set the strategy or would come up with the plan and what not, how did you go about educating them on the link between that and the execution? That you weren’t going to be necessarily most talented to do the execution but you had these skills over here. How do you go about talking and bringing the team together to really rally behind everybody doing what they were most talented to do?
Don:
You and I are both big fans of Marcus Buckingham’s work in this regard around strengths development. If I could distill his research into the one thing that most impacted my way of thinking, it’s the high performing teams are comprised of highly complementary actors; meaning they’re all pieces in a jigsaw puzzle to complete the picture. That means a very diverse team where one person has particular skills and expertise that complements everybody else. That team collectively performs as the whole where everybody is doing a role that are placed to their best individual strengths. Firstly, it’s about discovering your strengths and designing jobs around that. Then as a leader, assembling that team in such a way that all of the core duties of the team are covered and [inaudible 00:46:14] into their strengths as complementary actors.
That was profound for me when I first was exposed to his work. I saw him do a key note speech and then I went on to read most of his books. To this day, it’s so incredibly counter-intuitive to how we think about skills development. To paraphrase them, it’s like the HR industries engaged in this conspiracy of making people believe that all of their deficiencies are the things their supposed to write down in the annual review and then create a remediation plan around.
Nils:
Exactly.
Don:
That just sucks.
Nils:
Terrible.
Don:
No wonder why performance reviews are something that everybody loathes to hear, right? Both the employee and the manager. It’s because it’s like revisiting the only shit that you know you don’t know how to do. His philosophy is like throw that all out. Let people be their very best and design a role or a job around that. Don’t saddle one of them with the other responsibilities for things that they are not capable of doing. It’s not going to be fun for them. Man, that little simple insight just totally filled up my thinking. I’m always trying to understand within my team, what are their particular strengths and how can I best organize a role around that. It’s not always possible. Sometimes it’s necessarily to wear a lot of hats, but that alignment can really make for magical times.
I don’t know. Translating that back to customer success this is a toughie because if the role is inherently diverse, meaning to be a good CSM you need these lots of ingredients from lots of different things from technical knowledge of your product, to domain expertise, to being good relationship manager, and negotiator, to whatever. That’s really demanding. I think it’s a role that requires someone to be very, very well-rounded and very, very versatile. Maybe this strengths discovery process will help some people. Again, it creates some specialization within this umbrella. I’m going to predict that customer success will evolve to include forms of specialization that we’ve got to see where you might just be the technical product ninja and therefore you’re going to get engage to customer when that needs to occur as opposed to being a relationship manager, full stop.
It’s possible that customer success will begin to function like a multi-disciplinary team versus today where we tend to saddle one individual with every facet of the job. That strikes me as a bit of a challenge for many because I personally wouldn’t be able to do it for example given what our conversation of what I’m good at versus what I’m not.
Nils:
Taking full ownership to that is critically important for CSMs, for CS leaders, for VPs, CEOs, it doesn’t matter who you are. Taking full ownership of one, acknowledging and being aware of what you are most talented to do. Two, getting into a role or having the conversation with your manager or your superior, whoever it is about what you are most talented to do and how you can best contribute, because that is where the organization and the individual at the greatest benefit to each other. I really love the philosophy around strengths and running teams that way. I certainly agree with you completely that the highest performing most exceptional teams have those individuals focus on strengths, and where the leader is consciously orchestrating that work around those.
Don:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup.
Nils:
Coming up on the last question here. If you could change something about yourself, what would it be and why?
Don:
Are you asking me or my wife?
Nils:
For you, right now well let’s go with you. Then maybe we’ll have her on at another time.
Don:
When I was trying to figure out what I was going to go study in college, somebody suggested I’d be a lawyer because I could be very argumentative.
Nils:
That’s the strategic nature, yeah.
Don:
A good arguer as the case maybe, for example like I was in high school debate and that’s probably not an accident. I’m really good at arguing a point of view. It’s typically rooted in reason and facts, and some bases of why I’m taking a position. I could be really effective in arguing to the point where the other person engaged in that conversation really doesn’t feel like they are, but they’re an equal that I can drown them out. Honestly, it’s still something I need to work out. It’s so innate to how I communicate but I don’t know that I’ll ever get past it, versus just being aware of it and trying to mitigate it. That means that I’m blind to hearing things that I would otherwise hear. If I’m going to be me in terms of being forceful and how I argue a point of view, then other people may not be willing to share their point of view. The irony is that, I want to and need to engage in healthy debate with my team because that enhances my ability to make good decisions for the company I lead.
Nils:
Absolutely.
Don:
If I’m deprived of important information that would have otherwise come out in those interactions, then that makes me a weaker leader.
Nils:
Curious, what is one thing that you could do to move towards that acknowledgement of the other information and being open to that and not just barreling ahead because you’ve already figured out the answer and are 10 steps ahead of everybody else?
Don:
Yeah. Part of it is just deliberately slowing down and recognizing that it takes time to take people on a journey. Another is active listening techniques where somebody else says something and instead of responding, you play back what they said because then they feel hurt as opposed to your counterpoint to what they just said which sometimes makes somebody feel that they’re not hurt. There’s lots of techniques. I think about, have you ever heard about the competency model, the 4 stages of competency?
Nils:
Yup.
Don:
The first is you’re unconsciously incompetent.
Nils:
Correct.
Don:
You’re incompetent at something that you don’t even know you’re incompetent at. The next stage is consciously incompetent. Now, you’ve gotten a feedback to know you’re not good at it. The next stage is you’re consciously competent. Meaning you can do it, but you got to work hard at it. To use this example, I have to go into a meeting and like have the intent of using active listening skills, and do it purposefully as a conscious choice in order to have a good discussion. Then the fourth stage is you’re unconsciously competent, meaning you’ve developed that skill to the point where now you don’t have to think about it. They way Steph Curry makes a 3 pointer or shoots a free throw, right?
Nils:
Yeah.
Don:
He’s not even thinking about it. Obviously, that’s how fast he does it.
Nils:
Where are you on that spectrum like with regards to this?
Don:
Somewhere between consciously incompetent and consciously competent. It doesn’t come natural to me.
Nils:
Yeah. Okay. That certainly is a consistent theme for people who have the strategic strength as their most dominant which I suspect yours is actually, one strength is strategic. That is one of the biggest pitfalls of that strength and awareness that has to be built in. I’ve coached many people who had that dominant strength, and the number one area we always worked on was how to bring others in and not allow just going to the answer and leaving everybody else in the dust. It’s really fascinating to see that. One, it exists and has throughout your whole life because it’s the way you’re wired and that’s okay, and appreciate it because it’s wonderful. Two, that there are things that consciously work to develop, to harness that strength so that it can be used to its best advantage while still allowing for other people to use their strengths as well.
Don:
It’s not this particular skill that I have. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. People often say, “Oh, strategic. Strategic, it was good.” No, because without execution, no strategy means anything. It’s just like to your point. It’s just something that is part of me, and others have tremendous qualities and capabilities that I don’t possess. My gosh, my emotional intelligence is probably pretty low. Again, you should probably ask my wife about that. There’s lots of things I don’t know how to do this. I don’t see of any of this in judgment. It’s this awareness.
Nils:
Yeah.
Don:
It’s the awareness of who you are and all of that. How you work with others around you.
Nils:
When you understand the strengths of other people, you understand your own, then you understand that nobody’s ever out to get somebody else. They are truly just acting on their own best interests and trying to do what they think is best based on their strengths. That’s it.
Don:
You got it.
Nils:
[inaudible 00:55:17] Don, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate your discussion, and experience, and just wonderful to have you. Great to have you as a friend. Thank you so much.
Don:
Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity Nils.
Nils:
Absolutely. All right. Cheers.
Don:
Bye-bye.