71: Support Contributing to Revenue with Mike Redbord

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 71 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is support contributing to revenue. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Mike Redboard. Mike, the topic for this week is how support can contribute to the revenue of the business.

Mike Redbord: 0:42

Yeah, sure. So I think quite often, you know, support is seen by the CFO and sometimes even by support zone leadership as a cost center and a place where you know money should be minimized, right? And it's not seen as any place where there's a mechanism to contribute to growth. It's just a cost to be minimized and make it as small as possible so you can put the money elsewhere and focus on growth in sales or marketing or product. And that is just too extreme to be true. Yes, support is primarily engaged in the process of helping customers, you know, get the value they wanted and helping them fix problems. But it's totally wrong to say that support cannot have an impact on growth. And so there's a few ways that you can do that, I think. One is just like a mindset of growth in support. I think if your leadership and support, whether it's yourself as a support leader, whether it's your CFO or your CEO, if you all look at support as a cost center, that attitude is going to come out of your mouth. It's going to enter into your quarterly meetings, it's going to seep into the team, and the team is going to believe that they are a drag on growth. And that is super toxic. So the first place to start with this, I think, is starting to think amongst your leadership team and especially among your finance team, how can support contribute to growth? And you need to kind of ask the question and I think participate in a brainstorming conversation with those folks in order to start to change the dialogue if you feel like you're in a place where you don't have that. I think that number two is there are some really like interesting ways that support interacts with the customer lifecycle that oftentimes other teams do too. So you got like a sales team that will sometimes you know call into a customer when just earlier that day that same customer had called into support. And guess what? The customer doesn't pick up the phone when the salesperson called, but they were more than happy to call you and talk to you for 45 minutes about how this thing didn't work. And so I think there's a really interesting way to kind of carve up the customer lifecycle and think a little bit more opportunistically about ooh, when do we have customers in a state when perhaps the solution to their problem is actually buying something else? And can we, you know, kind of prevent some more work from landing elsewhere in the company? And I think that's a really interesting question, perhaps to even propose to your CEO, your CFO, to your VP, and be like, how can we start the conversation of thinking about how support can be a growth center? Because there are lots of opportunities out there.

Charlotte Ward: 2:54

That um starts to put sales and certainly upselling and cross-selling somewhat in the remit of your frontline agents, doesn't it? And uh I have yet to meet a support agent who is happy to in quotes do sales. So how do you frame how do you frame that to your agents?

Mike Redbord: 3:13

Yeah, I mean, so I would actually say it does not add the action of selling to support folks. There's a reason that we work in support, it's because we don't want to work in sales. If we want to go work in sales, we go do that. Things will be different, right? Yeah. And so I think it's actually very, very important for me to clarify this. Well, I'm I'm not saying you want to add in the verb or the skill set or the training of selling. That's not it at all. The the thing to understand is like they're all the same customers, right? And if you're if your company has a strategy of you know selling one product and selling more products to your customers, it's those same customers that you're trying to drive your business's growth on as it as are you know submitting tickets or calling into your support team. We do not want support to turn into sales. What we want support to be is aware of the fact that they're talking to the same people that are eventually going to spend more or less money and have commercial impact. And so there's a couple ways to do this, right? One is to think about it as okay, are we talking to a customer that is currently engaged in a renewal or currently engaged in a pilot or something like that? If so, can we, you know, take really good notes and pass that on to sales? And if your support team is already taking really good notes, all you need to do is surface the visibility of those case notes to sales, maybe with an automated email or something. And that's a way to start getting the support experience in front of the salespeople at no work, no cost to the support rep. And that's like a really interesting way to start to thread these together. Another way you could do it is if you have a variety of products, and sometimes customers buy one product and you know, maybe should have bought another one, or these two products play really well together, right? And actually the solution to whatever the customer is interacting with you about in the ticket is another product. Don't sell it, right? Like, don't go and actually do the sales, don't incent your support team to get commission or anything, but make your support team aware that solutions to problems can be buying more things, and that's okay. And then enable your support team to sort of tell sales that there's an opportunity here. And so this is something I like to call like a support qualified lead where the support person can say, you know, maybe check a box and be like, oh, this person could actually buy something else and check the box, maybe drop down what that other product is. Again, send a trigger to the sales rep. Sales reps are used to getting leads. This is just another type of lead, but it's going to be a really good one. So there's a bunch of ways you can attenuate this without having to, you know, go full sales and support, which is like definitely not where we want to go.

Charlotte Ward: 5:29

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there with that word, you know, solution. Like it's our job in support to find solutions. And sometimes the solution isn't us doing more work for them or us making them do more work to circumvent some shortcoming or some lack of feature that actually we're perfectly capable of solving a different way, but that different way just happens to be uh another tier or another product or you know, some other feature that we have access to for them in the organization. We just don't necessarily have immediate access to within the support team. Yeah. So it's it's opening those questions and thinking about it more as selling as solution providing.

Mike Redbord: 6:11

Yeah, I don't think of it as selling at all. I think of it as, you know, working in a in a business that is, you know, not a modern art project. It's not a nonprofit, it's a for-profit organization. And everybody has some responsibility to growth. That starts with the mindset, that starts with the leadership and all that. And then just giving people really dead simple, logical ways to help contribute to that. And if your support team's already taking really good case notes, you're probably most of the way there.

Charlotte Ward: 6:39

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash seventy one for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.