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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I know that we all care about giving value, about measuring value, about having great relationships with our clients as well as with our vendors, and that's why I'm so excited about the guest that we have for you here today, because this is someone who not only understands all of those elements, but this is someone who is also a builder.
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He is an entrepreneur by nature.
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He's got a great entrepreneurial story himself.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Zach Hawley.
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Zach is the founder and CEO of Steerco, which is a SaaS platform that's transforming how companies build transparent, value-driven relationships with their customers.
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Zach's journey is one of bold strategic moves.
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He left a high-paying corporate job to build Skirco full-time after seeing firsthand how companies struggle with value performance, roi measurement and bi-directional collaboration.
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Under Zach's leadership, skirco has evolved from vendor management into a powerful tool for sales and customer success management teams providing real-time insights, vendor scorecards and a centralized hub for better customer collaboration.
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If you're thinking to yourself, I'm not doing any of this stuff in my business.
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Well, that's exactly why we're bringing Zach here on the show.
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His mission is to empower businesses with the data and insights they need to build fair, transparent and mutually beneficial relationships.
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Beyond the numbers, zach is a passionate team builder.
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He's a mentor.
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He's a lifelong learner.
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He has a Udemy course on becoming a successful manager.
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He's led a growing team of enterprise customer success professionals.
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Outside of work.
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He's a dedicated dad of three daughters.
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He's an advocate for leadership development and he's someone who's always excited to connect with others who share his passion for customer success, for data and for innovation.
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Which, guess what?
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That's all of us here today.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Zach Hawley.
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All right, zach, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Yeah, great to be here, zach.
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I will say you've got a lot to live up to from that bio, so you're going to have to take us there to kick things off.
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First things first, who's Zach?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, so I started my career out of college.
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I went to Arizona State also known as the Harvard of the Southwest, known as the Harvard of the Southwest and I got out of school and went and started selling power tools for a company called DeWalt.
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I had no idea what I really wanted to do at the time, but I knew that I needed to start doing something.
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So I got into that role and that job at the time was so influential in everything I did after that because it taught me how to well one work really hard, which is something I didn't know how to really codify yet but it also taught me how to explain things that were really complex and make them really really simple.
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So by the time I ended up in a role across the country because I got married and we had to move for my wife's grad school.
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I ended up in a role with my first software company as a customer success manager.
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I was able to thrive really quickly because I had to explain really complicated concepts to customers and make it impactful for them.
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What could they get out of it?
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Concepts to customers and make it impactful for them what could they get out of it?
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Because of all of that I fell into really loving working with customers and helping them get the most value out of whatever it was that they were using.
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I think taking things that are really complex for just complexity sake and making them really simple is something that I learned just complexity sake and making them really simple is something that I learned.
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A I was really good at and B I really liked doing.
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So I started in that mode of software and never really turned back.
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I built a few different customer success teams at different software startups.
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I ended up with a bigger corporate role where I was managing about 200 million in revenue.
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I had a team of about 35 individuals, but there was something that I was noticing across every single role that I held and every customer that I was working with is it was a routine challenge to explain to customers what they value was that they were getting out of the product that they were using.
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It didn't matter what industry I was in, what customer I was talking to, what systems I was building internally.
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It was always a really hard conversation to tell them here's the percentage of the product you're using, here's how much more value you could be getting out of the product, and I really felt like that was something that was a mission worth chasing.
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So that's ultimately why I left and why I started Steerco.
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Yeah, I love that overview, Zach.
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I will transparently tell you here on the air it's probably one of the hardest and earliest lessons that I learned as an entrepreneur.
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When I started my marketing agency in my early 20s, I was fresh out of school, I was still living in Boston, which is where I grew up, and I thought I'm so great at technology, I can help so many businesses with search engine optimization, with website development.
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I thought I was doing all this great work until I realized when I would meet with clients and I was like they don't even see how good they have it.
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They don't even realize how good I am.
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I didn't understand.
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The onus is on me to convey my value.
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Talk to us about that, because I do feel like this is probably a lesson that a lot of business owners haven't learned just yet.
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Yeah, it is.
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It is really incumbent upon you to take that value evangelist role.
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I think we all want to believe the product that we're selling sells itself right.
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We're solving a problem.
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Of course, they realize that the solution to that problem is generating value, but people by nature are a what have you done for me?
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Lately they have that mentality, it's not a what have you done for me in aggregate.
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So, especially if you're selling a subscription service, for example, you are constantly being measured of how much value you're delivering in any given moment.
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Even if it was an annual subscription and you can point back to the first three months, they got all this value.
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If the next nine months they saw no difference from that first three months, it might not be worth renewing.
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It might have to be something they have a discussion about, where they go out and get an RFP and go to market.
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So it's really, really important and this is why customer success teams have exploded in growth is because you have to consistently and constantly explain the value that the customer is getting from your software and you need to do it or your product in general, and you need to do it in a way that's not, you know, akin to like virtue signaling.
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You need to do it in a way that is very organic, it's very conversational and it allows the customer to understand truthfully, deep in their bones, what it is that they're accomplishing and why.
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If they left, it would be really, really painful.
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This is something that often has to happen manually.
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We talk about it in customer success or account management.
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You probably heard the term QBR quarterly business review or EBR executive business review.
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This is a manual meeting that customer success managers, account managers, sellers, you know, anybody post sale has to schedule with the correct personas at a customer right.
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They can't just schedule it with the user.
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They have to also make sure that the person who writes the checks is available for this particular meeting and they have to schedule this meeting and they have to put together all these reports and all this data and they have to structure it in a way that's really valuable.
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It is a really hard thing to do and oftentimes those meetings become really self-serving.
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It has sort of evolved in the industry as to like a metric that is just a box that CSMs need to check.
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There's.
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It's become.
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Qbrs have become templatized.
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In fact, there are some that have argued that there is no QBR anymore, that the death of the QBR has already happened.
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So what we've really tried to do is make this system to where customers your customers could passively grab this value information Just whenever they had a question about it.
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They don't have to set up a call with you.
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To be honest, they don't want to set up a call with you, but they can now look at the data and if they want to set up a call with you, they can ask you questions about what they found, rather than having to set up a call just to look at it and then figure out what questions they might have.
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Does that make sense?
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Yeah, for sure, zach, it's fun.
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I always just have to have my listener hat on and imagine what are the people listening to us thinking of this conversation Because unfortunately they can't jump into the conversation.
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And so, with that listener hat on, I can think about all the business owners who are saying, zach, a customer success team sounds lovely.
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One I don't know what they do because I don't have the professional experience that you have.
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And then, two, I'm a small business owner.
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How the heck am I going to have a customer success team?
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Well, fortunately there's solutions like Steerco out there, so I want you to introduce listeners formally to that.
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But I'd love for you to give us an overview and some really insights, I guess, into that role, that function, because I would argue probably that entire function is missing in most businesses.
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Yeah, you're not wrong.
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So a customer success has become an evolution of account management right, and account management has been around for eons.
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Ever since customers have existed, we've had people who have been hired to manage those customers.
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However, up until about the last 10 to 15 years or so, most of those interactions were all sales and growth driven, and customers started to wise up to that.
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They didn't really like it that much.
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They don't want to just be sold to constantly.
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They didn't really like it that much.
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They don't want to just be sold to constantly.
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In fact, when they've initially purchased from you, what they really want is to understand how to use your product, how to engage with it, how to get value out of it.
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They want to know how to measure it.
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They want to understand what it can do for not only their business, but maybe their customers as well.
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And those are not sales conversations, those are not expansion conversations.
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Those are conversations that are simply just you and me talking about the agreement that we've entered into and you need help making sure that you can get the most out of the dollars that you spent.
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That's, ultimately, where the customer success philosophy came from.
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If you think about the actual words customer success.
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It is a very literal position.
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The role that that person inhabits is simply there to make all customers as successful as possible.
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And again, the philosophy behind it is if we can make our customers really successful, it will be a no brainer that they'll want to expand with us.
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It'll be a no brainer that they'll want to renew, that they'll want to continue doing business with us.
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So let's invest a little bit upfront to make sure these customers know how to use our product, know what value they're getting out of our product and ultimately want to become fans of our product or service so that way, when their contract comes up or a decision point comes up where they can purchase more or maybe even refer you to more business, it doesn't take an act of an account manager coming in to do a pitch.
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That customer is now pitching for you because they have you as a customer success manager in their ear, constantly telling them how great this partnership is.
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Yeah, zach, I'll tell you what.
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Hearing you talk about this stuff, it's so clear to me that you actually view an essential function of a business not just to have a great product or service, but to make sure that people are using it and winning with it, and so I'm going to throw a little bit of shade here.
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I think the easiest industry to throw shade at is probably the gym industry, because gyms are really great at getting us to sign up.
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They're really great at giving us a tour of the facility in our first week, but they don't care, quite frankly, if we come back or not, and there's so many statistics about that, whereas what I'm hearing from you is, if Zach is in charge of my local gym, you're gonna make sure that I'm using it, I'm getting results from it, all of that.
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How can we do that?
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Onboarding is one of those touch points, but what are the other ways that we can ensure that client success?
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You?
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know, one of the biggest issues I hear about in customer success is you know, I can't.
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I can't get the customer to do the things that they need to do to ultimately realize the value.
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And I think that that most people, I would say in life and in their professional you know world, think that the cycle goes I have to have motivation, then I'll take action, and then I'll see results, and then I'll have more motivation right, and then it'll it'll kind of just fly wheel down the road.
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I think a good customer success team or a good business owner who understands the concept of how people really think, I mean you can even take the gym analogy you just put forward.
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It doesn't start with motivation, it starts with action, right, and so what you need to be able to do is work with customers and work with people to just take that first step, because if they see action, they take action, they see results.
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All of a sudden, motivation follows.
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And I think you know, again sticking with your gym analogy, too often what happens is these gyms.
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They'll say, oh, okay, great, you just, you know, the reason you're not seeing results is you're just not motivated enough.
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A gym if I were running a gym, I would start a customer success team in that gym that would ultimately capitalize on the first action that that customer took by joining the gym and try to figure out some way, shape or form to show them the results that they're already getting.
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Just by taking that action and joining, maybe going once or twice, pick a small little detail, a small little thing that you can measure, to show them the results, you're going to increase that motivation.
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They're going to take more action, you're going to get more results, and that flywheel is really going to perpetuate all the way down the line.
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But there's a big key here, which is, after action, you have to be able to show them the results, otherwise the motivation will not follow.
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People don't just have action and consistent motivation.
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That's more discipline than anything.
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That's not really motivation.
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So you have to be able to, as a Sherpa, as a guide, be able to provide that motivation by leeching on to whatever the results are that they might actually have.
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Boom Zach, I believe you that if you had a gym, you would start a customer success team, and I know that that would revolutionize the industry, and so I love hearing how seriously you take this commitment, this responsibility for all of our businesses to convey that value and set our clients up for success.
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Talk to us about Scareco, because a lot of people listening to this are probably thinking how the heck do you build a SaaS platform that's going to help people with this?
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Give us the inside of how SteerCo works.
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Yeah, the way SteerCo works is it takes all of the data that you would otherwise be gathering in disparate systems.
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You know a survey system that surveys how happy your customers are.
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You have your own platform that measures how much they're utilizing your service all of the contracts that you've put in front of a customer.
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We also scrape outside public information around what is it that's going on in the zeitgeist and we bring it all into one central place and we ultimately have brought our own point of view into building a customer scorecard.
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Now, typically, this customer scorecard creation is nothing new.
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Every business that you work with, I promise you, has a score associated with your name or your business to show them how healthy you are.
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The problem with that is that's a very one directional relationship.
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It's a very parasocial relationship that they now have with you.
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It probably freaks you out If you're listening to this, or you, brian.
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It probably freaks you out a little bit to think that a business has an opinion about how healthy and how valuable you view that business right, but you don't know what that score is.
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It's, for some reason it's gated.
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The philosophy behind Steerco is let's open that up.
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Let's have a real conversation about what your health is what your value impact is or what your value perception is of our product or service.
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So instead of me just creating a scorecard that has all of my own bias associated with it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up this other end of it for you and we're both going to work off of the same scorecard and then take action off of that.
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And the reason that SteerCo exists is because companies have also tried to do that in the past, but they really can't justify dedicating engineering points to building something that is robust enough to actually measure the value that the customer is attaining.
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In fact, customers don't want these companies to dedicate engineering effort to measuring their value.
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They would way rather them dedicate engineering effort or consulting effort into improving the product or service that they're offering.
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So where Steerco comes into play is we are an unbiased third party that comes in and helps both sides of the equation get on the same talk track, the same playing field about, ultimately, what's going right with the relationship and what's going wrong with the relationship and what's going wrong with the relationship and where you could possibly see improvement.
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So the technology really takes all these disparate data sources, everything that you would have to manually cobble together and present you know, at best once a quarter, at worst never to a customer, and it gives it to the customer so that they can have it on demand.
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The other hope here is that while you're not in the room, the customer might have questions about how they're consuming your product or service.
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We've actually input more ways to contact you so that if they need to expand or they need to buy more, they're loving what they're getting out of this and they didn't realize.
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You also sold a use case over here that they haven't talked about in a long time, and now they're having that problem.
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We've instituted a way for them to be able to inquire about those new products and ultimately make expansion a lot easier.
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Companies have also tried doing this in their own product, but that Trojan horse doesn't really work anymore.
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That whole product-led growth initiative is starting to become discovered.
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So we're really hoping to pioneer this new form of growth called customer-led growth initiative is starting to become discovered.
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So we're really hoping to pioneer this new form of growth called customer-led growth, which is where you meet the customer where they are and ultimately they tell you what else they might need from you, hopefully allowing you to grow and sell the customer what they actually need.
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Yeah, zach, I love that overview.
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My mind goes in so many different places.
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I'll share a couple of them with you so we can go deeper there.
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One is, I think, about a great example of this.
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That I think is Spotify.
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As a consumer, I love that Spotify wrapped at the end of the year where they show you know you listen to X thousand number of songs.
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This year you had X number of playback hours.
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This was your top artist of playback hours.
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This was your top artist.
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It's cool for me as someone who pays for Spotify, because it's a reminder of wow, I actually do use this thing and it's ever present in my life, on my phone, on my smart devices, that I'm not going to say her name because then she's going to trigger, while we're talking together right now In my car, all of those ways that Spotify reminds me annually that I'm using it, and I also then get to share that with others, and we all share our Spotify wraps on our Instagram.
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So it's a really cool way to showcase how much value we get from it.
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The other place that my mind goes is it sounds like even doing this exercise, even walking through with our clients.
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That in and of itself is value, because, aligning with the scorecard that you talked about, I think back to my days as an early 20-something-year-old running an SEO agency.
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What I thought my clients cared about, zach, I loved showing them their organic traffic growth.
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A lot of my clients were like what am I ranking for?
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What am I in the top three for?
00:20:08.800 --> 00:20:10.257
And I was like who cares about your rankings?
00:20:10.257 --> 00:20:16.076
Well, the truth is they care about my rankings and so being forced to go through a scorecard is a valuable exercise.
00:20:16.076 --> 00:20:23.875
Give us some more insights there, because a scorecard is probably you're right, you said it's scary, but it's also probably a new concept that people don't set that up.
00:20:23.875 --> 00:20:27.550
But aligning on what is on that scorecard is gosh.
00:20:27.550 --> 00:20:29.597
That sets us up for success with those clients.
00:20:29.597 --> 00:20:33.394
Talk to us about some of those metrics or what should be tracked, and go on there.
00:20:34.699 --> 00:20:35.560
Yeah, absolutely.
00:20:35.560 --> 00:20:42.576
I think you hit the nail right on the head and you have this idea of what you think your customers should care about.
00:20:42.576 --> 00:20:50.541
But the best way to really understand that is just to ask them, and the best time to do that is right at the beginning of your relationship.
00:20:50.541 --> 00:21:00.653
Right, because that's ultimately why they purchased you, why they purchased your product, why they purchased your service were to solve very specific problems.
00:21:00.653 --> 00:21:08.259
If you deviate too far from that and you start to put your own bias and your own agenda into what you think they should do, remember you're not running their business.
00:21:08.259 --> 00:21:13.142
They are and they have a very specific mission for why they've engaged with you.
00:21:13.142 --> 00:21:16.814
Your job is to deliver on that mission.
00:21:16.814 --> 00:21:36.970
And some of the things that go into a scorecard that you can teach your customers about that you can throw a lower weight to if you want to weight these different metrics, are things like how many users are using your product, how many people have engaged with your product.
00:21:36.970 --> 00:21:38.696
Those are very typical.
00:21:38.696 --> 00:21:43.919
Another piece that goes into a scorecard are things called sentiment surveys.
00:21:43.919 --> 00:21:46.859
So you might've heard customer satisfaction.
00:21:46.859 --> 00:21:50.960
Those are the zero to five like how much did you like this interaction?
00:21:50.960 --> 00:21:54.778
Customer satisfaction CSAT is what you often call them in the industry.
00:21:54.778 --> 00:22:01.156
Another one is net promoter score, and net promoter score is a very popular survey.
00:22:01.156 --> 00:22:02.261
You've all seen it.
00:22:02.261 --> 00:22:06.654
I can promise you that you probably didn't know what it was called, but it's the.
00:22:06.654 --> 00:22:10.923
How likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend?
00:22:10.923 --> 00:22:11.951
That's it.
00:22:11.951 --> 00:22:12.813
It's one question.
00:22:12.813 --> 00:22:14.635
And it's zero to 10.
00:22:14.635 --> 00:22:19.358
And you bucket there's a methodology on the back end on how to analyze this data, but you can bucket the responses from zero to 10.
00:22:19.358 --> 00:22:26.186
And you bucket there's a methodology on the backend on how to analyze this data, but you can bucket the responses from zero to 10 in terms of detractors, passives and promoters.
00:22:26.186 --> 00:22:30.472
And some of you are listening to this and thinking to yourself oh, I've got to start doing it.
00:22:30.472 --> 00:22:59.417
I can also tell you you have also filled out those surveys and your response has gone into a big old algorithm with the company you filled it out for, and they are trying to figure out how to slowly or quickly increase your score from detractor or passive to promoter, to promoter, and what they're trying to do is take all of this data and look at it and try to figure out what they can do in their product or what they can do to adjust their service to make sure that, in aggregate, everyone moves their scores all the way up.
00:22:59.417 --> 00:23:05.596
So oftentimes your survey response goes into the scorecard that you're being scored on.
00:23:06.738 --> 00:23:17.438
We also talk about in our scorecard, at least, and how I've scorecarded other customers in the past for larger organizations is how much are they spending, how much is your customer spending?
00:23:17.438 --> 00:23:29.809
That is not only important to you as a business selling to customers understanding how much your customer is spending, believe it or not and we never really want to talk about this it's really important to your customer.
00:23:29.809 --> 00:23:36.440
They are constantly judging the value they're getting from your product or service based on how much they are paying you.
00:23:36.440 --> 00:23:41.599
And then there's another extra nuance there, which is versus how much they had budgeted for it.
00:23:41.599 --> 00:23:53.972
Right, because if they overextended their budget for you, their expectations of what you need to deliver are exponentially higher than a company who you know you were a fraction of their budget.
00:23:53.972 --> 00:23:57.892
They decided to take a flyer on you and ultimately, if it doesn't work, they can write it off.
00:23:58.955 --> 00:24:13.839
It's also why giving away any product or service for free doesn't really work, because you're immediately a success by just showing up that day and you can renew for $0, or you can buy $0 more worth of stuff very easily.
00:24:14.256 --> 00:24:15.048
I just did it, right.
00:24:15.048 --> 00:24:17.980
I just bought from you for zero more dollars, right?
00:24:17.980 --> 00:24:27.910
And I think that that's also something a lot of entrepreneurs get hung up on is if I can just get a couple of free users on to my app or if I can just get a couple of free use cases.
00:24:27.910 --> 00:24:30.836
I can use them as case studies to get more customers that'll pay.
00:24:30.836 --> 00:24:34.390
Use cases, I can use them as case studies to get more customers that'll pay.
00:24:34.390 --> 00:24:37.632
And it's a very misleading metric.
00:24:37.632 --> 00:24:50.073
And remember, if you and the customer are on the same playing field, talking the same language about how healthy you are as a business, and cost or spend is a major component of that if you completely make that component irrelevant, the scorecard is immediately flawed.
00:24:50.073 --> 00:24:59.517
So those are just a few things that we throw into a scorecard, but there's a ton more that I would encourage you to talk to your customers about and what they care about, based on what your product or service does.
00:25:00.018 --> 00:25:01.080
Yeah, I love that, zach.
00:25:01.080 --> 00:25:04.397
Again, another hard knocks lesson for us as entrepreneurs.
00:25:04.397 --> 00:25:10.097
Those who pay pay attention, and it's so important for us to understand that very powerful concept in business.
00:25:10.097 --> 00:25:12.583
You kind of teased it, so I do want to hear your thoughts on it.
