116 - Get Your Customer Journey Mapping Right - Jennifer Peters

Are you getting stuck while doing a customer journey mapping? Join Jennifer and me as we explore the mistakes to avoid and get advice on creating an effective customer journey map. We also talk about where to start and how to get internal alignment for journey mapping.

Jennifer Peters is a Customer Success Leader specialising in Seeds and Series A startups. With more than a decade of experience in the customer success field, Jennifer enjoys the start-up and scale-up environments where the groundwork and the foundation of customer success have the highest impact on growth.

She specialises in building customer journeys that maximise impact on revenue and customer engagement, leading to high growth that originates from high retention combined with new business acquisitions.

In today’s episode, you'll learn about:

✅ Mapping out Customer Journeys

✅ How to Conduct Journey Mapping Workshops 

✅ Mistakes to Avoid in Journey Mapping 

✅ What's After Customer Journey Mapping?

Watch now and don't miss out on this video because it's filled with valuable tips to help you with customer journey mapping, resulting in higher revenues and happier customers.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you want to start mapping your customer journey, where do you start from, what are the mistakes to avoid and how to get internal alignment for journey mapping? Jennifer Peters, customer Success Leader, specializing in early-stage startups, has all the answers. Join us for a mini-masterclass on mapping customer journey. So let's get into it. Customer journey so let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Hi everyone, this is Maria Scobepile and you're listening to Women in Customer Success podcast, the first women-only podcast where remarkable ladies of customer success share their stories and practical tools to help you succeed and make an impact. If you want to learn more about customer success, get career advice and be inspired, you're in the right place, so let's tune in Today. I'm really, really excited to welcome Jennifer Peters, customer success leader, specialized in seed and serious A startups. I think we are going to have a very interesting conversation about what happens with customer success in those early stages startups, so I'm so, so, so excited. Jennifer, welcome to Women in Customer Success podcast. Hello, thank you for having me. Okay, you know there's a book. You heard me at hello. Now I think that I heard a little bit of French accent. Jennifer, I need to ask you where are you calling from? True, I am.

Speaker 2: 1:27

French, despite my very American sounding name, and I live in the Netherlands.

Speaker 1: 1:32

So just to be a bit more confusing yeah, just to make it a bit more interesting, right, where about in the Netherlands?

Speaker 2: 1:40

Right next to Amsterdam, so I'm quite close to the beach actually.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Oh, that's beautiful. Are you cycling? Not really.

Speaker 2: 1:47

I should right as a Dutch person, but I'm much more of a hiking person, so I chose the wrong.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Flat country Hiking is awesome, but yeah, everybody kind of connects Amsterdam with cycling, but the beach over there is also just beautiful to go there and look at tulips. I think it's the season soon, right, right, yeah, it's about right. I can already see the rich cultural backgrounds. Tell me, what languages do you speak?

Speaker 2: 2:13

I speak French. Obviously. I come from a region called Alsace, so I speak German as well, having been brought up on the border between France and Germany. English I learned in school, Dutch I learned at my hairdresser's.

Speaker 1: 2:33

And I'm currently learning Chinese. Chinese, oh my gosh, I can't say Chinese anymore. I have Mandarin now. Mandarin, wow. I wish I can learn any of the Far Eastern languages. I was trying Korean on Duolingo learning sounds didn't go much past that, but like it's, wow. I really admire you for that. Now tell me why Chinese, and what's actually your favorite Asian destination?

Speaker 2: 3:04

Because I do believe you travel quite a lot to Far East Asia. Yes, whenever I can, I go on a 12-hour flight and I go as far east as I can, so I've been to Japan and South Korea. I really enjoyed South Korea, but I think my favorite destination is the next one, and I'm going to China in September and I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 1: 3:22

Oh my gosh, that is awesome. I can so relate to that. Yes, give me 12 hours flight, or even 14 hours, all the way to Tokyo from London, and I'll be happy. I also had a chance to be there a few weeks ago and, oh my gosh, I just want to go back there. What do you like about those Asian countries? Like there is so many things to talk about when it comes to the culture and their values, but what makes you keep on going there?

Speaker 2: 3:47

There are quite a few things actually. There are similarities to the French culture a lot. It's a lot about food. It's very family-oriented culture and we spend hours at the table together, which is super familiar for me as a French woman. But there is also this really rich and old culture and millennials of heritage and that's to be respected. And when you go there and you see temples that have been standing there forever, you feel very, very small on the grand scheme of history and I, like I kind of have a lot of respect for that.

Speaker 1: 4:21

I like that really humbling approach. Yeah, you feel small in front of such a long history, although, coming from Europe, there is such a long historical heritage here as well. But thank you for sharing that. Let's go back into Europe and your background. I'm interested to know what was your career background and how did you end up in customer success?

Speaker 2: 4:46

Well, I don't know what I would have done if I had not ended in customer success. Let's put it that way.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Oh, it sounds interesting. I wonder now where could we go with that question Like what would you do differently?

Speaker 2: 5:01

It's a bit of an adventure. I hopped on the wagon almost as soon as it arrived in Europe 15 years ago and I joined right after that. So there were maybe five people in all of the Netherlands region that I knew and that worked in customer success when I started. But I really struggled finding my spot in a company I have a sales degree originally finding my spot in a company. I have a sales degree originally knowing that I didn't really want to do sales, but I was good at it.

Speaker 2: 5:30

I have a knack for customers and I'm a bit technical, so I'm a bit of a jack of all trades and I didn't want to specialize in anything for a long time. And I joined this company under client operations and one day our CEO said you are all customer success now and then he left and we had to figure it out. And we were five people and we looked at each other and said let's do some research and this is where we found the ancestors, the gainsights and the sales force and what the US was doing. And then we tried to adapt it to a more complex and diverse European market where you deal with 10 countries and not necessarily the one customer persona.

Speaker 1: 6:14

So yeah, we figured it out on our own back then. Yeah, that sounds like a very interesting strategy. Enter the room. Hello people, now you're called Customer Success. Bye, that's startup life. Right Bye, I'm going. Hello people, now you're called customer success. Bye, that's start of life. Right Bye, I'm going. That's it, you know. But I can see how much growth did that bring for the whole team, because when you just have to figure out all by yourselves, we're almost being given so much trust. Right, because that was it. This is your new title, your new department. Do whatever it takes, whatever is good and worth doing In a way. Sign me up for that. Right, you don't have constrictions of what to do?

Speaker 2: 6:54

I mean that was amazing. We had carte blanche to try anything we wanted. The first QBR format was really out there and the funny thing is we were CSMs two customer experience professionals so they knew what we were doing. So we had a lot of pressure to set an example on how it should be done. And so my early years in customer success, my learning curve was so steep and I got to see the CX programs of a lot of companies in Europe and stick my nose everywhere. So I got to see the CX programs of a lot of companies in Europe and stick my nose everywhere, so I got to learn a lot from a lot of different companies really really fast.

Speaker 1: 7:31

I like to. That's just an amazing exposure, learning from so many different companies that are doing customer experience and some of them customer success right, Exactly. So what happened in those years when you decided to kind of specialize more deeper or more focused into very early age startups, Seeds and Series A? Firstly, would you like to just quickly explain to the audience like what is the main difference and what do we even mean by Seeds, startup, and then obviously Series A, and what do we even mean by seed startup, and then obviously, series A.

Speaker 2: 8:07

Yeah, so it's a moment where you start getting investors right. So your first seed investment typically you will be very focused on the acquisition of customers and it's about lifting your business off the ground. Then Series A you start to build a customer base and you've proven your concept and you need a new investment to kind of take it to the next level and let it grow. This is typically where your customer base reaches a size, where customer success starts to make sense. And I enjoy coming in there because you have this blank canvas where you can just create, and it's much easier to create something new than to come in and to fix something that has gone potentially wrong. So that's my favorite part.

Speaker 1: 8:54

So would you typically be the only, or at least the first, customer success professional in those companies, because in those early stages it's very likely they don't start hiring yet for the whole customer success team. It's very likely you are building the methodology out.

Speaker 2: 9:11

Typically there are one or two people who are onboarding customers, so it's a very small team. It's mainly focused on the onboarding and or implementation side of things, but not necessarily in terms of recurring revenue or recurring renewal yet, because the company is usually so young. So when that recurring renewal and recurring revenue component becomes a factor in the overall growth of the company, this is where I kind of come in. Typically the teams are still quite small at that stage.

Speaker 1: 9:43

How small, like one, two people or five.

Speaker 2: 9:46

The smallest was one that I got One lady on morning.

Speaker 1: 9:53

That's what I typically get on fractional level. You have white canvas, you have no one else. Go and figure, which is really interesting. There are nice, nice challenges with it, but it's very nice. As you said, they're typically onboarding professionals, right? Because in the very early stages of the companies you want to make sure customers start adopting the product and very likely onboarding is always almost going to be the first part of customer success team and then comes everything else. So probably a year later the company is realizing, oh now we had our first renewals, now we should start focusing on it a bit more. Okay, so this is really good.

Speaker 1: 10:36

What I would like us to do next is speak about it. How do you say it in French? Gosh, you said it so nicely Carte blanche or white, carte blanche or white canvas? Carte blanche, yeah, Carte blanche, beautiful, okay. Customer journeys or mapping out customer journeys. So you are a CS leader in an early stage startup and you have white canvas to build everything from scratch, to understand what is even the journey that we want our customers to take. How does it look like? And I can tell you when somebody tells me to do it, I have to do it, obviously. But first thing is like, oh my gosh again, how long is it going to last, because this is a very overwhelming task, or it could be. So I would like to hear some specialist advice from you. Where do you start from and what is your methodology of building or mapping out a customer journey?

Speaker 2: 11:32

Yeah, customer journey. I think that's the first thing you should do. So whenever I come into a company whether it's a blank canvas or there is an existing team I will always go through a customer journey mapping exercise. And, yes, it can take months if you want to have a finished product, but there are various milestones that you have in between and especially when you start in startups, the customer journey is not super complex yet right, and you can build up on top of it over time. So I think the first mistake is to look at you know the finished product and feel completely overwhelmed by it and forget, and therefore you are scared to just start.

Speaker 2: 12:15

And the way I like to start is to bring various people into one room and to have it as a workshop, and in that room there is typically team leaders or directors of various disciplines, so there is marketing, sales, support, products, so all kinds of disciplines, except maybe for finance and HR. But anything that has more or less relation to the customer will be represented in that room, has more or less relation to the customer, will be represented in that room. And then we go chronologically from a customer's point of view and we start with the customer's perspective and we're like okay, you know, chronologically, how did they find us? How do we engage with them? How do they buy? What do you? How you know, what do they want to feel during the onboarding? And we go chronologically only from a customer's point of view and we go back and take the same chronology and say what are we doing To cater to all of these things that the customer is feeling and needing and wanting during that journey? And then you have what you are currently doing and then you start identifying gaps. Or during the workshop there are conversations yeah, we're doing this, but it's not really working. So you have something that is broken or you know we're not actually doing this at all. So you have to start it.

Speaker 2: 13:41

And it doesn't matter if you have a blank canvas or if you have an existing customer journey. You can always run that exercise. An existing customer journey, you can always run that exercise. You just have to get out of the day to day and get into that one room with the right people. So don't do it just in customer success. Do it with the product, with support. They talk to a lot more customers every day than the customer success team does anyway, just from sheer volumes of tickets, which are usually bigger than any interaction CSMs will have, but also the sales team, which is a big component of the journey, because everything you have arriving post-sales has had interactions with marketing and sales in the pre-sales process. So you want to have them there.

Speaker 2: 14:26

And the customer journey doesn't really start at purchase right, it starts before that. It starts the first moment your customer has met you in whatever shape or form. So you need to have those disciplines into that workshop as well, to kind of build it out. And when you have your interactions, then you build your processes. How do you measure the effectiveness? Then you build your processes. How do you measure the effectiveness? Then you build your KPIs and then who do we need to make it happen in that phase of the customer journey? And then you map out the disciplines that are involved in that particular moment and then you have your work groups.

Speaker 1: 15:03

And then it becomes much more and more complex and then you can separate the teams and work in more details. I like how we are taking almost approach of two swim lists. So one is the actual workshop of journey mapping, physically in the room, on the white board, with all of those stakeholders, and another one is what do you even do? What do you include in that journey mapping? So let's talk a bit about those logistics, which is incredibly important. Like, obviously, if you can have people in person in the same room doing the exercise, that is the best thing ever. It's awesome. But people get very busy and obviously you need to make a case internally that we have to do it. So how do you even make that workshop not to take too much time from those people? How do you make it so efficient and how many of those days or workshops would be enough for at least MVP to have something to get you started and then build on it later on?

Speaker 2: 16:09

So I think the shortest of those workshops that I've run was with a very small group of six people and I think we did it in about two hours and I think the biggest group that we had was about 25 people and it took us three and a half hours.

Speaker 2: 16:25

A lot of post-its. I can tell you that If you can't be in the room, you know they have tools like Miro and you know collaboration tools where you can just move things around and put your own, your virtual post-its somewhere, and you can also do it like this. It's just a bit more tiring because people are sitting at the desk looking at that screen for many, many hours. So if you can do it in person, it's a lot better for many, many hours. So if you can do it in person, it's a lot better. And if you can mix people together, so don't have six people of customer success and two sales, but really have an even population and foster conversations around those post-its. And typically this is where the goal comes as well, and the understanding of each other's pain points comes through that workshop as well, when they start seeing the bigger picture on where they fit into that journey.

Speaker 1: 17:18

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Speaker 1: 18:36

So, as a facilitator of those workshops, what are your main questions? Do you have one main question for each swim lane, for each department. Where do customers find you here? How do they feel? What do you want them to do Like? What are those guiding questions? How do you even create it or facilitate such an important conversation? Why am I asking? Because, even three hours, even if you have four people for four hours in the room, I mean it's great if after four hours you can come up with something. That is an amazing starting point for all the other work. But you want to really utilize the time and make sure it's as efficient as possible and that people can contribute the most. What are your tips for facilitating those sessions? I'm sure many of the listeners have found themselves in those situations or are about to facilitate one of those sessions. So what would be the tips you would give them?

Speaker 2: 19:30

So I think the important bit is to provide the structure, and what I like to do is to function with some sort of table and it can be a virtual table that you just build on a window or a wall or whiteboard, it doesn't matter and the horizontal header are the customer's journey phases and typically marketing will have an idea of what those phases are right and they will have like an awareness phase and an education phase and then the sales team will have some sort of commercial engagement phase that leads to a commit and the purchase and then you have, you know, onboarding, adoption and then recurring impact, right. So this is a very broad, generic, very classic customer journey phases. The way you facilitate it is in those lines in the table, the vertical headers. And for this I always start with the customer and I think it's really important to start from there so that people get outside of their KPIs and their day-to-day and what they are already doing and really put themselves in the shoes of the customer or the persona that they are actually working with.

Speaker 2: 20:38

And for this there are a few things. The first question is what is the customer doing? Are they on the website? Are they looking at a tutorial? Are they downloading a white paper? What is it that the customer is doing? The second is what is the customer wanting? So, is it information? Is it support? Is it finding peers? What is it that they want? And then the third one is how do we want them to feel when they are doing what they are doing where they are doing it? So, is it supposed to be easy? Is it supposed to be detailed? Is it supposed to be fast? You know, what is it that? How do we want them to feel? What is the experience that we want them to have? And then you need a break. So, after you've done all of this, typically everybody has a break, gets out of the room conversations, go grab a cup of coffee, and then we go back. And then we come back into the company.

Speaker 2: 21:38

And this is where you have a look at what are the touch points that the customer goes through when he's doing what he's doing. What are we providing? Is it an online academy? Is it a support hotline? Is it, you know, a portal, a community? You know what are the touch points that are there. Once you have those touch points, how do we organize activities so that those touch points are met?

Speaker 2: 22:06

So if you need an online academy, that means that somebody has an online academy, creates that online academy, maintains that online academy, promotes it. You know there are a few things that go around that touch point that online academy. So these are all a bunch of processes and things that function internally so that academy exists and provides the experience and the what and the why that the customer wanted before. So it all comes down and it all relates. And then you need the people to make it happen, and this is where you're going to sign up your team or your discipline to make sure that you are performing and delivering. And the last component is you need to measure right If you don't know if you're doing the right thing, if you're not measuring it. And together you can then find KPIs and that creates a lot of alignment when you have seven disciplines in the same room agreeing on three or four KPIs that are going to make that phase of the customer journey successful and indicative of their performance. So that's why I love to start with a workshop.

Speaker 1: 23:17

That is just awesome. So many nudges of wisdom. Well, this is a mini masterclass of how to actually run a journey mapping, which is wonderful, and that was an exercise that team leaders, departmental leaders, do in isolation of everybody else. You do it in the room. When does it happen, or does it happen? Would you take that journey in some shape or form to your customers to validate whether you capture it right, how do they feel in those stages or what else would they like to see? What do you do next?

Speaker 2: 23:54

So this is where you need to differentiate between a blank canvas and an existing journey that you're trying to prove, right? So blank canvas, an existing journey that you're trying to prove, right? So blank canvas. You don't really have any reference points. You don't even have a lot of customers, right, but you do have a few advocates where you can measure or get an idea of the effectiveness of what is currently happening. And then, when you build it, then you immediately measure it and then you have an idea if it has any impact on your business at all. Right Before after, very easy, because before there was nothing and after there is something. So that's the easy part. The complicated part is when you have existing processes and an existing journey in place and now you have this brand new journey that you've just mapped with all your colleagues and it might not correspond to what's happening today and you might be very far.

Speaker 1: 24:52

It's just a beautiful you know future state how we feel and think it should happen. But then we are far from reality.

Speaker 2: 24:55

Exactly, exactly. So the thing is you're already measuring a bunch of things in the customer journey at that point, if it's already in place, and especially in the pre-sales. Marketing and sales are very astute at measuring conversion everywhere until the customer buys right. And it doesn't matter if they have 24 touch points. Each and every one has their own conversion rate and it's usually quite developed in terms of metrics. Post sales it's a lot more complicated and it's not as measured typically.

Speaker 2: 25:30

But if you do have a journey, you will have some sort of CSAT or NPS right. You will have at some point a customer gets it. So you have one measurement. Another measurement is the number of churn. That's also a very good measurement of where things break. If all your customers churn, or if 50% of your churn happens during onboarding, your onboarding is broken right, you don't need a workshop to see it typically. So your priorities, your priorities, will crystallize right in the churn, in where things break typically.

Speaker 2: 26:08

If nothing crystallizes in terms of breakage, uh, then you have to start looking a little bit deeper and this is where you need to start doing more of a customer segmentation or tiering and go deeper and have a look at your different customer personas and how they function into that journey, to find where your nuggets of improvements are. But I think what people are typically looking at is to add on to the customer journey when one is already existing, and I think, as a leader, it's tempting because if you add on something, you immediately prove impacts on the company. Right, this is what I've done. I've created this, so it's very tempting to add on to the customer journey, and actually sometimes it's just better to remove things from the customer journey, even if it's to concentrate them in a different format or in a different way. I think people are very reluctant to remove things from the customer journey to do optimization. I think this is important, though.

Speaker 1: 27:10

Lesson thinking. This is very interesting. So you're tapping almost into human behaviors and psychology when leaders are employed to do the work and map the journey they need to prove to their boss. Yeah, such a good job that you hired me. You see what I did? I added this Two months after. This is the result Perfect, right, and you're saying it's tempting, but try not to do it, try to avoid it, because simplicity is better. Why is that so? Why simplicity is better. Why is that so? Why simplicity is better. I mean, I would think it's obvious, and also for customers yes, just try to make it always as easy as possible, as short as easy. That would be my philosophy. But what have you seen Like what is the actual impact of removing things and making things simpler, rather than us thinking that we need to keep on adding things?

Speaker 2: 28:01

for customers, so I'll give you an example. I think is telling something that I've seen. Right so it's a SaaS platform and during onboarding there's a sequence of emails that comes to you to tell you to that's supposedly supposed to onboard you onto the system, right? So I sign up as a trial and I get those emails and it tells me why I should set up the system and what I'm going to achieve with the system and a lot of the why and the how and the what, but the how was completely missing. So I received seven emails, but none of them tells me actually.

Speaker 2: 28:40

Go there and click here and choose add and this is your checklist of to-dos. It was more about thought leadership and industry knowledge and things like this, but it doesn't tell me what it is that I need to do to go live with the system. So it's very fancy, it sounds very smart, it's a great thought leadership content piece. It's wonderful, but it's not an onboarding email. Removing it is very scary because if you remove it, you suddenly don't have any onboarding at all. Right, but what you have to see is that you never had an onboarding in the first place.

Speaker 1: 29:17

You just called it onboarding. You just called that email onboarding.

Speaker 2: 29:21

In that moment. So if you move that content and you put it in white papers that your customers can use and your sales team can use as enablement as well, and you start building an onboarding that is actually going to onboard your customers, then you will have removed the entire onboarding, but you will have created an onboarding. So, net-net, you still have an onboarding, but the quality and the impact of that onboarding looks completely different, because your conversion rates and your successful onboarding and your time to value goes down. And then you have metrics to measure impact.

Speaker 1: 29:56

I really love that example. It's not even that much about just removing things. Nothing needs to happen, random, but really looking properly into how is it at the moment, and then when you realize, oh sorry, it's not actually onboarding, it's completely something else, then again you're making an impact because you are recognizing that it didn't exist. It was there but it wasn't the thing. Right, it's suitable somewhere else.

Speaker 2: 30:22

Exactly, and if you start mapping your customer journey from a customer's point of view, you would never write that email. You would give the information that they need to actually set up the system. If you start by thinking, from the customer.

Speaker 1: 30:36

Which now brings me to that question again which part of that whole mapping would you, or would you at all, ask some advocates to check it out and just to see whether you're on the right track or whether they would want to change something? Would you even do it or no need for it? Because you can measure each of those different touch points and then you can make decisions based on data, because I've seen companies doing both ways. I've seen some companies a few years ago almost having a few focus groups of customers and presenting it all to them just to get their input. Again, it's a very small subset of customers. What did you see working?

Speaker 2: 31:16

well. So I think the customer advisory board, the CAB, is a very good idea to kind of test things out but also to ask and validate some of those assumptions that you put in the customer column, because you start the workshop in the customer's shoes and you want to validate some of those things. So you don't have to show them the table to validate what you've put in there, but you can ask them that same question when you arrived into the system, how did you feel? You can conduct post-onboarding interviews. If you have too many customers, you can complement those with post-onboarding surveys. The same for support. So I think you can definitely ask the questions that you have asked yourself during the workshop. I'm not sure I would necessarily show the entire table, but for example, the one that is all about the customer, those kind of three lines, those three buckets. I would definitely. I would definitely do that.

Speaker 1: 32:19

Okay, now, that's really wonderful advice. And okay, now we are coming to the place where you have your journey mapping. Let's say you did a few of those workshops, you had your MVP in a way of simple version, and then you're building more complexity onto it, and you mentioned previously. Then you would assign working groups of who needs to do what, what are the responsibilities, and basically implement what you identify, for example, adding survey here, adding another touch point in this other place. What would be those immediate next steps following the journey mapping?

Speaker 2: 32:57

So the most immediate next steps following the journey mapping. So the most immediate next step is to prioritize, prioritize, prioritize Because you will have a list of a million things that you can add on. You can do better, and it's going to be very tempting and it's going to be very overwhelming. So the first advice is anything that is broken gets focused, Because this is a leaking bucket, it's probably generating churn and therefore it's a leak in the bucket of revenue that you need to plug and therefore anything broken that is probably already showing in your number and your churn analysis or anything like that, needs to be tackled first on.

Speaker 2: 33:37

If you do that, then you might still have 200 things in that phase right, Some are going to be low effort, high effort, low impact, high impact. So use that grid and put all your things that are in that phase in that particular thing column that you're working on, and then put them on the grid and then forget everything high effort, low impact and just eliminate those. That's probably going to be a lot of them or any and then anything that is going to be sort of low effort, high impact, first priority, and then anything that is then high impact, high effort. You build a roadmap for it, because it's going to probably take longer to implement it and then you can start working on it, but more as a project management rather than a low effort, high impact that you can just set up a survey and add it on there.

Speaker 1: 34:31

I really love that. Thank you for reminding us of the grades, which is incredibly important. As you said, you will come up very likely with hundreds and hundreds of different tasks and ideas because, especially when you have the room full of people working on those different items, there is so much creativity and brainstorming that happen and everybody wants to do great for the customers, and the list is always increasing. So focus on low effort, high impact, firstly, and then create roadmap for high impact and high effort and eliminate everything else, because it's not going to happen in the near future, right? No, exactly.

Speaker 2: 35:08

Or, if you even get there, your business will have changed so much, your product will have changed so much. You might have to review a different part of the journey and move on to a different set of activities.

Speaker 1: 35:21

Jennifer, this is such a wonderful not even mini, but a masterclass in journey mapping. Thank you so much for joining. As we wrap up, I wonder what would you say to aspiring leaders in customer success that are about to start with those activities and just start with all of those strategic work and planning that has to happen as leaders, as they are emerging from being individual contributors to leaders. What's your recipe for success?

Speaker 2: 35:51

I think it's really not easy to move from individual contributor to leader. I think as a senior CSM, you don't really get to map a customer journey. You see it, you're in it, but you're not necessarily designing it or managing it. The same for the revenue that is attached for every phase of the revenue. I think this is also a very new concept for someone who comes into a leadership position from an IC. If you just started, or if you're looking at getting into leadership, those basic things are really the skills that you need to learn right now. And I think the best way is to ask yourself if I was to join a company and they have absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, what would I do? And if you don't know? Well, this is what you need to learn and then you will get your first leadership role, because you'll have a better understanding of what it is that the CS leader does.

Speaker 1: 36:48

So get focused on the revenue generating activities to understand what happens where, and you will be able later on to map it. Yeah, yeah, excellent, jennifer, this was such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming to the show.

Speaker 2: 37:03

It was my pleasure. I love talking customer journey. Anyway, you have to stop me or I'll be there for another hour.

Speaker 1: 37:10

No, I don't mind. Thank you for listening. Next week new episode, Subscribe to the podcast and connect with me on LinkedIn so you're up to date with all the new episodes and the content I'm curating for you. Have a great day and talk to you soon.