Matt Best
speaker
628 appearances
20 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard 30 Aug
Matt Best’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's fantastic to hear that support.
Matt, what about you? It's funny how we seek inspiration in some of the strangest places. But I've had a reflection of my own over the last couple of weeks. I've been back out on my bike a little bit, which has been really good and really energising. But for once, I've stuck with it for a period of time.
So rather than doing one ride and then giving up for another three weeks and then going back and doing it, I've done sort of back-to-back fairly decent bike rides recently. And something I noticed, if we think about this in the context of growth and sales, is how the power of kind of sticking with it and then tracking your progress. So I've climbed the same hill three weekends on the bounce.
And the friend that I go riding with, shared the Strava link and the PB that we achieved last week. And you just think that's those little wins, right? It's a small goal, but these just stepping stones that gives you that motivation and that drive to go forward. So yeah, that's what I was celebrating in this past week. Awesome.
So Chris, diving into your experience and the insight that you could share with this audience when it comes to kind of client centricity. We talk a lot about client centricity with our clients, but also for ourselves. And I think I see the importance of having a client-centric approach. And obviously Planhat is really built around that.
And the Planhat CRM software is built around that client-centric approach. And it's perhaps unique focus in perspective of the customer rather than perhaps coming at it from a sales or marketing pipeline perspective. So how has this client-centric approach shaped the development and growth of Planhat in your eyes?
And how do you ensure that that kind of permeates throughout every level of the organization?
I think the interesting thing for me here as well, Chris, and coming from a sort of CS background myself, I think there's all of that complexity that exists within the team in terms of process and the journey, the overall additional customer journey complexity. The other thing is the various different integration requirements. And I think that's such a huge part of it.
I always sort of liken this to my experience in the trading world. And if you have a front-end trading platform like a Bloomberg or whatever... define what it is because everybody starts there, right? It's the point of contact for the end user. So the trader originates the activity and they originate it in that platform. Therefore, that platform dictates downstream.
And it's those middle and back office systems that have to do all of the joining together and the sellotape and the glue and the staples that knits it all together. And I guess that's where Again, Planhat and where it's originated with this client first is going to have that complexity of, right, we need to take from a billing system. We need to pull from a IT service management system.
We need to pull from the product itself because we need to understand what that usage looks like. And that extra layer of complexity there in implementation causes more challenges. But it's so critical as a CSM having all of that in a single pane of glass view in order to serve the customer most effectively. Yeah.
I think it also, to me, talks to the challenge of the evolution of CS. And Chris, I'm curious to get your thoughts here as the value of CS in the business and how to demonstrate that value and how to quantify the value. Because so often, again, it's a little bit perhaps more binary and a little easier to quantify that value of a salesperson by their success in closing and winning work.
And where you've got someone in CS, CS is still so often seen as a cost center value. which is kind of crazy to Johnny's point of it being at the heart of retaining your client base that you've worked so hard to get. What does that mean, not just for PlanHap, but just in your experience, Chris?
There's not necessarily a direct question there, but I'd love to get your perspective on CS and where you think it fits and how you think it should be seen and how PlanHap maybe helps do that.
I think one example you gave there of the household B2B, clearly that's an operating model. That's a sort of directional challenge, which, as you said, is the top-down piece. There's the other bits that Johnny talked about there around training, enablement, coaching.
There's culture that could be used as a bit of an umbrella term, perhaps, that just sort of, yeah, that encapsulates a lot of that stuff. I mean, we would see typically challenges around, you know,
um remuneration and compensation as being kind of key drivers are we driving all of the right behaviors that's a bit more of the stick than the carrot i think there's for me and what i've seen in various businesses is and this is linked very much to the culture but it's almost the people armed with or not necessarily armed and that's probably the point
but tasked with the job of looking after clients and growing clients and how they are seen under the CRO banner in terms of the autonomy that they're given, the capability to serve in the best possible way.
The level of experience that you're hiring, I've seen organizations who see CS as a feeder into sales or product and it's sort of part of, and it's where you go into CS through being a good support technician. So that's for me is fundamentally the wrong way around because CS is about developing, nurturing the relationships better. of those clients that define your business.
So is that something that you're seeing as well when you're not necessarily just your clients, but also when you're out in the market? Is that still something that you think that we're all sort of working towards?
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