🌶 Mo McKibbin: Moxion, Head of Customer Support and Success

Market-to-Revenue

47 minutes with Mo McKibbin: Head of Customer Support and Success at Moxion. Sales as a strategy, not a skill set. Helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Building the entire customer operational process from scratch. Tight feedback loops between the customer and the business. Making customer success a whole company sport.

20 insights. 8 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

I'm in the camp that sales is a strategy and not a skill set. When I think about driving growth at any part of the funnel, whether it's more obviously pre-sales, but also post-sales expansion adoption, it's really all just about helping the right customer. And when I say the term, customer, I also mean pre-sale customers. For me, everyone's a customer, whether or not they bought. So, helping the right customer solve the right problem, in the right way, at the right time. Maybe that problem is, "I need to find more information about how to do my job better." That would be content, videos, best practices, things like that, and that is helping them solve the right problem that is relevant to the ecosystem of your products, at the right time. Maybe it's, "How do I apply this product to achieve this value proposition that I bought into during the buying process?" That would be more on the customer success side of like, "We're in the product now. I need to apply the product to achieve this desired business goal." So that would be solving the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. All of the operational theories, or structures, or methodologies, that I do is built around that concept. It's a little bit more holistically. Less about what sales does, or support does, or what success does, or what marketing does. It's more customer-centric because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're a product-led growth company, or a sales-led growth company, or marketing-driven, or whatever. At the end of the day, the only thing that's driving revenue is the customer buying your product. So it's all about, "What will a customer find valuable in this moment? How do we consistently deliver it?"

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

So as far as putting this into three bullet points:

1) Investment in customer experience has contributed mostly to any sort of growth of businesses that I've had the joy of creating processes and operations for. That usually works, not only just by achieving incredibly high conversion rates – because I try to create approaches that are really tailored towards exactly delivering that right experience at the right, the right information to solve the right problem with the right time – but also word of mouth, and loyalty, and advocacy, and expansion. So I would say, I have no insights in the top-of-funnel or demand gen sort of world, as much as, it is all about nurture, conversion, solving problems, and then delivering a great experience that then causes word of mouth, loyalty, and expansion. So, the way that we do that from a tactical sense, is we create operational segmentation to facilitate scalable personalization. Now, that is a lot of buzzwords. I really like to take things apart and organize things. So, I like to organize my customers by operational segments, lifecycle segments, and personalization segments. So, operational segments has to do with the amount of touch that a customer requires. So a really common would be the difference between what is a low-complexity self-serve customer versus a high complexity enterprise customer, are probably the two ways to think about that. Then, personalization segments is, “What is this customer's desired outcome use case?” A good example for a tool that everybody uses, because it's the OG project management tool, is take something like Trello. If you're using Trello as a software company, you're using it very differently than if you're an event planner. Personalization segments are a little bit like, “What are the common goals that our customers are using these products for? And how do we create paths for them with enablement, with videos, with what we introduce them at the right time that are actually aligned with their goals?” There's a self-serve version of that, but then there's also a high touch version of that where it's more like coaching and consulting to get enterprises on the right path or change management within that. So, I think that that was just a big “one.”

2) After you break apart your operational segments, it's optimizing both for digital and human touch. I am of the mindset that you actually need both because you have to help customers the way they want to be helped. Some customers prefer self service and want to do all of that exploration on their own. They want to get information and they don't want to talk to anyone unless they absolutely have to. I'm a buyer like that. The only time I've ever bought something that required me to get on a phone or in person was my house. But, some people also really need it. Some people really need that extra help. I've acquainted it before as, “What is a better experience if you're in a hardware store? Is it somewhere where everything's really well outlined, so that you know exactly where to go and what to pick up for what you needed for your hardware product? Or is it something where someone greets you at the door, and they ask you about your project, and they give you consultative advice on what to do and how to pick things up?” The truth is actually both are great experiences, depending on the customer. If I am a seasoned person who knows what they're doing, and I want to get up and running right away, I want to just get in, get out, self-checkout, make it as seamless as possible. If I am starting a project on my bathroom, and I have no idea where to get started, I want to talk to someone and make sure I don't screw anything up. So, operational pathways based off of that segmentation, that's what it's trying to facilitate to create both a self-serve path, and so you can actually optimize the times that human touch is valuable and has an ROI because everything else is automated. So it's not one or the other. It's that they have to both work in tandem in order to work it successfully and scalably.

3) Once these operational systems are in place, I think the most important part of this puzzle is actually building feedback loops between the customer and the business. And so, by that I mean, between the voice of the customer and product, the voice of the customer and marketing or growth or however you're calling it, the voice of the customer and engineering, all of these arms of the business that have some sort of customer impact, building these feedback loops is, essentially, the investment in customer experience that causes customers to feel listened to. It makes it more of a relationship. From a product standpoint, you're building the right product for the right customer. If you can facilitate these feedback loops in a way that you can quantify, and understand, what customers want the most, essentially the impact it would be on the business from a growth and marketing standpoint, if you are building these feedback loops between what the customer is actually saying they find valuable, it makes it easier to then deliver to the top-of-funnel demand gen people that it's, "Oh, these are what we should be saying. Our value props are because this is how we're going to attract more successful customers.” And then, obviously, the most common on the support side of things, the succe...