Customer Success Secrets Every AE Needs to Know | Matt Sterenberg (Modern Campus)

Carter (00:01.126)
Hey Matt, give the people a quick intro. You know, what do you do now? Give me your background. All that, all that good stuff.

Matt Sterenberg (00:10.51)
My name is Matt Sterenberg and I am the Senior Director of Customer Success at Modern Campus. I've been in EdTech for 12 plus years in a variety of different roles. Started off my career in EdTech with parchment and worked at an instructor for some time. I've led teams in customer success, sales, and customer advocacy as well.

Carter (00:31.882)
And you, I saw on your LinkedIn, you were a comedian. How much has that helped your career and sales skills, if at all? Because the first thing that Sean said to me when I asked him who to get on this, he said, oh, you should talk to Matt. He's very funny. He's very personable. So I'm wondering, should every salesperson be taking an improv class? And yeah, has that helped you at all?

Matt Sterenberg (00:51.608)
I think it has helped me because you have to be comfortable and uncomfortable conversations. It obviously helps to break tension, make people laugh. Ultimately, sales is about endearing yourself, gaining the trust of someone. And I think if people can see that you're a real person and making jokes, and it's not just like you're trying to get something from them, that you're generally having a good time and you're listening to them. And those are really the improv skills.

listening and reacting. And humor is a way to tell people that you're listening, right? So you're observing things, you're making interesting observations. And so I think it helps. I don't think every salesperson needs to take an improv class to be honest with you. You know, if you are taking one class, it might not really stick, but I think there are some principles that are good to adopt. I don't think it's necessary. I don't want to be those people that's like, if...

How is improv the key to sales? I think there are certain things that help, but it's not, I don't think it's a silver bullet put differently.

Carter (01:50.705)
Haha, right.

Carter (01:56.841)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. On LinkedIn, you said many view higher ed with skepticism and question the value in ROI. And I'm not in the industry, but it seems like there's a lot more anti higher ed rhetoric online as time goes on. How are you adapting to that? And do you have any tips for salespeople on how to navigate?

Matt Sterenberg (02:18.082)
Yeah, I think in higher ed, there's a lot of tension. So number one, you have the rising costs of higher ed. With the rising costs of higher ed, people are starting to ask different questions. And what's making this even more important of a question is because we've tried over the last decade plus to really focus on college access, which is a great thing. We want people to go to college. We want at least anyone that wants to go to college to be able to go to college.

So we have more people that have access to college, but the costs have gone up. So all of those people are now going, what am I getting with this degree? I'm in debt potentially, but I don't have the job that I really wanted. So then you introduce the ROI question. So when you're asking those ROI questions, that puts pressure on the college to go, what is the return on investment of this education, right? We want people to enroll here.

How do we communicate the value? And what has happened is it becomes a more transactional relationship, right? Where people used to go to college, it was an amazing four years. We're here to develop you as a young adult and then send you off. Now the question is more transactional where it's, okay, I spent four years here, I'm $100,000 in debt. Did you help me get a good job? So it's not just four years to learn and grow, it's...

How did this set me up for my next thing? It's a more direct translation into what did this get me rather than an individual I developed now it's up to me to get a job because of the rising costs. There's just more pressure on being like, hey, I'm a hundred thousand dollars in debt. I graduated and now I'm not working in a field that is with my degree. This isn't the trade-off I thought I was expecting. And so it's just introducing more questions. And then you have a lot of jobs.

because of the increased access, the skilled trades are paying a lot of money. They need plumbers, they need electricians, they need all sorts of these skilled trades because we have a supply problem. So now it becomes, well, before I went to college under the premise that it would make me more money, I don't know if that's the case anymore. And so for higher ed, they're asking themselves these questions and it is changing the transactional nature of college.

Matt Sterenberg (04:42.37)
What is this actually giving me? Can you get me the job that's gonna pay me more and that is in the field that I wanna work in? And that's tough for higher ed. And so I think higher ed is just asking themselves a lot of questions. How do we actually connect to workforce, employment? How do we set our students up for success? Whereas when it wasn't as expensive, you didn't really have to ask those questions, right? If college was free and you're like, I spent four years there, didn't cost me anything.

So I don't have the expectations that it necessarily has to repay the debt that I incurred. So as a sales rep, what I would be really conscious of is when you're selling something, how does this help a college communicate the value? How does this make a college more efficient? Because budget cuts are real. And so it's not just how does this make a college more efficient, but how does it lead to a college's goals, which are

pressure on them to actually provide opportunities for their students. So yeah, I think you just have to take that into account. It's not just, this saved us 40 hours of work. To what end? Right? What did that 40 hours of work allow you to do? It allowed me to spend more time with students so that they don't unenroll. It allowed us to do more with academic advising so they don't consider transferring.

or it allowed us to save money so we can stand up a program that's in demand in our local area. So it's always to what end? Don't just say it saved you time and money. What does that time and money get a college?

Carter (06:22.45)
And maybe this is a little bit similar to some things you're saying. From your experience building customer advocates, what specific things during the sale increase the odds a customer becomes a champion later?

Matt Sterenberg (06:38.914)
Well, first you have to have their trust. And so if you have like a rocky implementation or they feel like we weren't communicating well enough, those are all things that you have to take time to recover. So if you have failure to launch, that's problematic, right? Ultimately it's, we keep our promises? That's kind of the baseline. Do they trust us? Do they think we're a company that's worth working for and with? And then it becomes, do we feel like

we're getting engagement. Are you only talking to us if you're asking for money, right? How do we actually start to build up more of a community so that they feel like we're actually partners in this and listening to their feedback? So I would say it's more like what not to do, how you can lose advocates, because ultimately they bought your product for a reason. They had a vision for how it was going to be implemented, the time and money it was going to save them, the value it was going to create. And if you can't deliver on that,

then you have to start all over again. And so really it's, we keeping our promises? Can they trust us? And then I find that people are really happy to be advocates, right? And so, you know, an important part is why did you buy this? What pain are we trying to solve? Making sure you're aligned on that. And then throughout your relationship with them, it's doubling back on that value, asking them the question, is it what you expected it to be? And then if...

The answer is yes, I find that people, especially in education, are happy to share their experience. That's at least been my experience with institutions. I'm always amazed at how giving people are of their time, as long as you're meeting their expectations and have their trust.

Carter (08:21.652)
So, because that's my next thing, you talk a lot about reducing churn. Does it come down to a lot of just setting clear expectations? Like for example, what are the early warning signs a customer will churn and how and what should an AE do to get around those issues early on?

Matt Sterenberg (08:40.344)
So I think there's a few different legs of this stool. there's, you you could look at product usage metrics, you know, time to value, how long did it take us to get through implementation? You know, there's a lot of times where people are not unhappy, but they're not necessarily, yeah, that took a little bit longer than we thought it would. So look at implementation, how long did that take? Product usage metrics, right? They're not using the product at all. That's a challenge. So what data can you get from there?

Obviously doing customer satisfaction surveys is a really important thing. So a lot of people do NPS or voice of the customer, whatever it may be. And so trying to gauge it there. And then also like, how are you innovating? Like where's the institution going? Are you meeting their needs? Have you listened to their product feedback? And those things are not always perfectly aligned. You might see someone that's using the product really highly.

but then in their customer satisfaction survey, they rate you very low. What does that mean? It means they're a hostage, basically, right? They're using the product, but they don't really love it. They're begrudgingly using it. The minute they can leave you, they will. And then there's the people that don't use it at all. And you're like, we need to re-engage them. We almost need to do a re-implementation or try to figure out what's going on. Maybe they had turnover or whatever else. And that's another.

Carter (09:51.71)
Right there out, yeah.

Matt Sterenberg (10:04.566)
risk factors if the champion leaves or whatever else, like those are things you have to kind of be ready for, but any kind of predictive analytics you can have along customer sentiment, along with product usage, those should give you a pretty good indicator.

Carter (10:21.372)
Is there anything a rep should be doing before the deal closes that makes your job easier on day one and gets ahead of lot of these things?

Matt Sterenberg (10:30.346)
There's a few simple, simple things, is who's important to these conversations? So if you have like a technology implementation, the sales rep sells the deal. It goes over to implementation. Implementation might be working with IT, right? They might not be working with the end user. They might not be working with the decision maker and implementation. So implementation might be working with IT folks the whole time. It finally goes live.

And do we want to go back to the sales rep and go, Hey, who, who should I be scheduling a quarterly business review with? Like here was our implementation contact, but implementation has taken six months. Like who's still involved here? So the simplest thing you can do is document who are the key players, who are the decision makers, who are the daily users. Right. And both of them are very critical, but in customer success or customer advocacy, like we

have to know at a bare minimum, who should we be talking to on a daily basis? And so documenting that clearly, and then also the pain, why did they buy this? And this is a good thing for sales reps to really reflect on. No pain, no sale is what I was always taught, right? So are we documenting why they bought this software? And then from there, we can double back and say, they bought it to solve this problem. And then a year goes by and we're at the renewal, we can go,

Here's initially why you bought this software. Have we delivered on this? Or we can present metrics back to them and say, here's why you bought it. According to why you said you bought it. According to our calculations, you've saved X amount of hours, which allowed you to spend this much more time with students or whatever the case may be. But then you're holding their own standard. You're reflecting it back to them. And if you can do that effectively, then you know that you have a product that they're gonna renew.

Carter (12:30.09)
That makes a lot of sense. You've done customer success, managed AEs, and ran customer advocacy. Most salespeople only see their side of that equation. What's the biggest thing they're missing about how those three connect?

Matt Sterenberg (12:46.178)
Well, I would say sales reps, mean, having managed sales reps, customer success, like sales reps often don't want to know details, right? They're like, how do I get this deal in? And you know, sometimes they just lob stuff over the fence and they're like, yeah, I kind of told them the integration was ready. Hope that's not a problem during implementation. And so for sales reps, I would just say,

Carter (13:12.583)
Yeah.

Matt Sterenberg (13:15.01)
Number one, for sales leaders, think about the incentives. How are you incentivizing a good handoff? Right? So some organizations do that through, you know, if they renew their contract, the sales rep gets a comp on it. If you're in a land and expand type of business, you have to communicate back to the sales reps. Hey, if we screw this up, that's going to prevent us from selling them other stuff because we lost their trust. So if we're a company that's like,

We land with this product and we have other bolt-on things or other products we want to sell them. It is absolutely critical that we nail the first one. Because if I'm unhappy with a company, why would I buy other stuff from them? But ultimately, communicating back to them, you're going to ask me for references. You're going to want, you know, stories on an RFP. Help me make that job easy. Let's not do failure to launch. Like make it really easy for me to understand.

who I should talk to, what the value is, so that we can get them off the ground so that I can make them a really good advocate for us, which goes back to you whenever you're selling your next deal. Because especially in education, people talk. And when our customers say it, it's true. When we say it, it's selling. So make it easy for me for the customer to tell us a positive story rather than us saying how great we think we are.

Carter (14:37.482)
And then you, wanted to talk about your podcast or the one that you were doing with with Parchment. You hosted Credentials Unscripted. Do you feel like that helped you a lot in your job when it comes? I know we talked about the comedian thing a little bit, but there is that storytelling aspect. Or did it help you in terms of learning more about the industry and talking to more people and getting some knowledge there? Really? Or not at all? Like was there some aspect of it that...

you know, whether it be storytelling or just learning more about the industry that it, that it helped you in doing that.

Matt Sterenberg (15:09.908)
Absolutely. Yeah. I honestly, just for me personally, the podcast was invaluable just in terms of listening and hearing from really smart people that care a lot about their area of education. It taught me so much. Like what are the questions people are asking? What should we be thinking about as a company? How do I understand what their job is? What do they care about? So just for me alone,

The amount of times that I was talking to someone on the podcast as a guest, learning from them, understanding what we should care about in higher ed. And then I'd be on a customer call say, you know, I've heard from people that this is a big challenge or this is what they're thinking about. And they'd be like, yeah, absolutely. So just for me personally learning about the industry, it was very valuable. And then also just making connections to people, right? We were very, very protective of the podcast. never.

sold anything. It wasn't a Trojan horse to sell people things. And it was a way to validate how we thought about the market. And so I thought it was a great networking vehicle, but also just for me personally, I can't tell you how many things I learned from talking to really smart people.

Carter (16:13.543)
Yeah.

Carter (16:30.644)
Did you, I know you said you guys weren't selling things. Did you guys, did a lot of leads come through that channel?

Matt Sterenberg (16:36.942)
So it's a little bit hard to track that. So we actually, we could look at the amount of people that were listening to the podcast. We had some kind of directional ideas of who was listening, but I think you can actually pay for like other more advanced metrics on like how people got to the URL and things like that. So we were able to tie it to the people that were engaging and clicking on the link and whether or not

And opportunity ended up coming from that, but we really never wanted to tie it directly to opportunities because we weren't selling anything, right? Just because someone listened to the podcast and opportunity gets created three weeks later, doesn't mean it came from the podcast. They could have attended a webinar two weeks later. They could have, we could have met them at a trade show or conference. And so, you know, no one emailed us and said, I want to buy things from you because Matt did such a great podcast, right?

But ultimately it's a long play of endearing yourselves to the community, building trust, the fact that we're not trying to sell them anything, the fact that they know that we're thinking about this and we're creating content that's helping them understand their job and their industry a little bit better. And so I think if you wanna make the podcast a direct connection to sales, I think that's a slippery slope to, all right, let's start putting ads in there, let's start plugging things.

And over time, you might lose your audience, right? Because who wants to listen to something where I'm trying to be sold, right? So I think you have to be thinking about the podcast as a vehicle more broadly of why are we doing this? We're trying to engage our customers. We're trying to learn from them. We're networking with them. That's great. You know, and if you want to do a podcast that's on just customer stories,

You could do that too. And it is more of a selling thing and people kind of know what they're signing up for, right? It's more of a audio version of a case study. For instance, you could do it that way. I think over time, your listenership would probably decrease, you know, because it's not like, man, I want to keep listening to episodes of case studies. You know, you're only going to listen to the one that matters to you. Yeah. So I think you have to be a little bit careful thinking about it as like a, this creates

Carter (18:51.432)
Yeah, it's going to get old pretty, pretty fast. Yeah.

Matt Sterenberg (19:00.542)
leads, it creates engagement, which the next time they get an email from you, they might be more likely to click on it because they have an affinity to your company or your ideas. Right. So it's a little bit opaque and it's not a great answer because I wish I could be like, we generated $2 million. We had some op reports, but I was always very careful to say this came directly from the podcast because they never identified that to us.

Carter (19:32.414)
Yeah, well that makes a lot of sense. Well before I let you get going, do you have any rapid fire, like quick tips for salespeople?

just off the top of your head.

Matt Sterenberg (19:40.438)
I would just say listening is a superpower and that's really asking a lot of questions and listening and letting people tell you what's going on in their heads rather than being the typical sales rep, is let me sell you something. And it's amazing how much easier it can be by just repeating something back to somebody.

They might say, yeah, you know, we had a lot of struggles with our previous vendor. The amount of times I was on a call with a sales rep and they would be like, interesting. And then they would just move on. That's gold that you're leaving on the table. You're listening to them and you're reacting. That's all it is. You're just mirroring. Exactly. Right. That's exactly the term that was used in our sales training, which was trouble with a vendor. That's all you have to ask back. And they, yeah. And then they start telling you more and more.

Carter (20:26.238)
Like a mirroring type of thing you're saying.

Matt Sterenberg (20:39.106)
What about that experience made it so difficult for you? What are you looking for in your next vendor or your next partner? What would success look like? And ultimately, asking the hard questions early saves you a lot of time on deals. So just really put yourself in a position of listening and reacting and reflecting back to them, and you'll be amazed at how far you can go.

Carter (21:05.372)
Okay, perfect. Well, I think that's pretty good. I think that people got some good stuff here. I will end it here.