Learning how discussion and debate help reduce friction at work with Natalie Lambert

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Episode Summary

An important segment of any organization is its employees — on whom the company’s success depends. It is just as important to take care of your current employees as it is to find suitable candidates when recruiting new ones.

That’s why many choose to transfer employee management from manual to digital and use platforms and tools that quickly find suitable candidates.

In healthcare, the Apploi platform can help you attract, hire, and engage talent. Their comprehensive analytics dashboard gives you complete visibility into every stage of the hiring process, and you can actively follow and analyze workforce, recruitment, and hiring trends at each of your facilities.

In this episode of Taking the Lead, our host Christina Brady welcomes Natalie Lambert, the CRO at Apploi. Natalie describes the quota-carrying AM, retention-focused CSM, and enablement-focused CSM roles, and she gets into the importance of using discussion, debate, and commitment to reduce moments of friction at work. Natalie and Christina discuss how to structure a CSM team and how to start creating a compensation plan.

Guest Profile

natalie

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

The Quota-Carrying AM Role

In my experience with a quota-carrying AM, you have to have a function of relationship building. And I say that because that’s where it starts. You need to intimately and deeply care about your customers, the problems that you’re solving for, and how deeply you understand their journey to this point. Most account managers are given a book of business or an existing customer base, and their job is to upsell, cross-sell — in some way gain more revenue from that customer base. And you cannot do that unless you understand their journey unless you understand why they embarked on the partnership, to begin with. What has their onboarding or implementation journey been thus far? How much are they using and adopting the platform, and are they seeing the results they expect from the platform or the services that you offer, and has that evolved since the time they purchased? And a great account manager will be passionate about learning about their customers, their journey, their experience, and their pains as it exists today — and does your product and service even offer a solution for them?”

A Retention-Focused CSM

“Some customers will churn. That’s something you need to bake into your expectations. You’re not going to keep every customer, even if you are solving big problems for them and even if your platform is delivering. There could be a change of the guards who want to bring their new favorite service to the table because that makes them more successful and efficient in what they’re doing, and they don’t want to learn a new tool or software. And so your post-sale team could be doing everything right, and there’s still just some innate churn. You can help mitigate that, but that’s an important piece of it. You should also understand what the business needs from a retention perspective.”

An Enablement-Focused CSM

Depending on how the entire revenue pre-sale and the post-sale team is structured, there is potentially a need for product enablement, meaning their work is incredibly important to ensure that the customers are onboarded in a way that’s smooth and efficient. A lot of times, onboarding, implementation, and configuration can be very manual. Maybe there’s a migration that has to happen that the product can’t just easily do or build. 

The other thing I think about is post-sale or post-implementation; there are things that our customers need that are unique to them that we can’t necessarily build. […] The product enablement type of function can be really important, and where I think it should be used is when you are trying to validate your product/market fit.”