What happens when you go from being customer-centric to customer-obsessed?

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from David Cancel, the CEO of Drift, the company behind conversational marketing, which emphasizes 1-to-1 conversations with your potential customers over a more traditional sign up-to-drip email series.

So why are we featuring a company that starts these conversations with a chatbot, instead of humans?

Because David, a 5-time startup founder and former Chief Product Officer at HubSpot, has without a doubt one of the most human approaches to understanding his customers that I’ve ever come across.

But he wasn’t always this customer-focused. In fact, he stumbled onto this approach almost by accident 10 years into his now 20 year stretch in SaaS, and it’s what has helped set Drift apart in the already crowded messaging market.

In this episode, David and I discuss:

• How not having enough money to afford a proper support team led to the biggest breakthrough in his career, and how that helped him evolve from being customer-centric to customer obsessed
• Why the only metrics that matter for measuring individual and team performance within a company are customer-related metrics
  
• How doing the unscalable is critical to a company’s success
• Why it’s so important for employees to discover their ‘superpower’ in order to thrive (as well as what David’s superpower is).

He also shares the biggest insights that he himself has gotten from his personal interactions with customers.

Honestly, David was a GOLDMINE of information on how to run a customer-focused company. So have your favorite pen and notebook handy, and get ready to take a ton of notes.

Topics Discussed in This Episode:

• [00:02:27] The story of a time that David’s 11-year-old daughter came to his office to do a pricing study on baked goods
• [00:06:38] The difference between a company that’s customer-centric and one that’s customer-obsessed
• [00:07:09] How David got the idea for his business model at Drift
• [00:011:07] What it looked like to have engineers communicating directly with customers
• [00:011:43] What Drift’s methodology looks like now
• [00:15:22] Which customer metrics Drift measures
• [00:17:55] How customer metrics tie into the performance of the team
• [00:20:15] How Drift is doing cohort analysis
• [00:20:56] Whether individual performance is tied to customer metrics
• [00:22:48] How Drift keeps different members of their product teams in touch with customers
• [00:25:42] Why David switched away from having engineers take support calls and chats
• [00:27:42] How the leadership team at Drift communicates with customers
• [00:28:41] What one-to-one marketing means and how it works
• [0032:00] The biggest insights that David’s gotten from meeting personally with customers
• [00:34:17] Steps that David took to make his product easier to use for customers
• [00:35:38] How Drift segments different types of customers in order to better serve different markets
• [00:39:08] What Drift is doing in their company culture to ensure that their teams are successful
• [00:43:10] Why David thinks it’s important for employees to find their superpower
• [00:44:22] How to find your superpower
• [00:49:03] What David considers to be his superpower
• [00:49:58] How David would convince others to adopt a people-first approach
• [00:52:11] Resources that David recommends