Breaking Down Silos: Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration for Better Customer Experiences with Jay Nathan

Chris: [00:00:00] Are we using video? Yeah. We'll do video for now. Let's assume that
Nicole: it will be on YouTube at some point.
Chris: Perfect.
Jay: Yes. All right. Go for it, Nicole.
Nicole: Hello and welcome to CX Nexus, the podcast where we, I'm going to start that again. Hello and welcome to CX Nexus, the podcast where we explore the connection between community and all parts of the customer experience.
Nicole: I'm one of your co hosts, Nicole Saunders, here along with Chris Detzel.
Jay: Hi, Chris. How are you
Chris: today? I'm really good. Nice. Sunny in Dallas. Nice and warm. And it's almost the weekend. So that's exciting.
Nicole: That's exciting. I'm very much looking forward to this weekend as well. We're celebrating my brother's 40th birthday.
Nicole: Sorry to out you, John. Party. It's gonna be a good time. We are joined today with our guest, Jay Nathan, who is the new chief operating officer at Cherokee. Jay, welcome
Jay: to the [00:01:00] podcast. Thanks. Glad to be on with y'all. Good to see you. Yeah. Hey man.
Chris: Yeah, it's good to see you, man. It's it really hasn't all been all that long since, I've talked on the place.
Chris: Thanks for coming. And One of the things that I know you're really good at, you've been dealing with, customers, upsell, cross sell, sales, you've been in everything. And so before we start getting into our topic today, I'll probably ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, your background, and we'd love to hear
Jay: more about that.
Jay: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. And I love what you all are doing here because having been in a community software company, I know how important it is to integrate community with. The other parts of the business is actually what makes it work really is when you have buy in from customer success and product and support and even sales marketing.
Jay: So that's what you guys are doing. I, you are welcome. The way I describe my career is a goat path. I've gone a bunch of different angles and I finally condensed it down. [00:02:00] After hearing somebody else do something similar I was an engineer starting out, turned. Professional services leader turned product leader, turn customer success leader, turn general manager.
Jay: So I've gone through, a bunch of different things. I've worked in a bunch of different areas within all within SAS companies for the most part, SAS and professional services organizations. And it's given me a lot of breadth and perspective on different parts of the organization. Even when I was in services in my early jobs, or even in engineering, I always.
Jay: Talk to people outside of my group, and I feel like it always made me better. I understood them better and I could integrate with what they were doing a little bit better. They understood me a little bit better. So I think that's maybe the golden thread that's run through all those different types of experiences that I've had in SAS over the years is that it's just all about blurring the lines between the functional groups, because departments are a necessary evil, right?
Jay: In most companies. They're not actually good for the customer that manifest as companies get bigger and [00:03:00] bigger. But anyway, we, I digress. We can talk more about that later. But but, yeah, that's a little bit about my background. Today I am the chief operating officer at turnkey, which is it's a we have a retention platform for high volume subscription businesses, like SAS companies that do and consumer services and entertainment media and that kind of thing as well.
Jay: Awesome. Very cool.
Chris: So I'll get it going. So on today's topic and Nicole and I've been You know doing some of this year it's for me for sure. It's a big, responsibility around I still own community but also thinking about the upsell or cross sell within a product company, right?
Chris: And i'm working heavily with cells marketing i'm on the marketing team I report to cmo and at our company but i've been tasked to say, you know Look expansion is a big key and we've got to figure out how to you know Move those interactions engagements and one of let's back up one of our bigger Strategies is around abx.
Chris: So account based [00:04:00] experience, okay I don't know if you know what that is, but basically at the end of the day From a net new standpoint. It's really about I think, interactions that are going on in an account instead of going after one person. If three, we, our threshold is three. So if three people from one account is doing something, then we have our BDRs to go after them.
Chris: And then there's a whole automated net new play. For all those accounts, we use some other stuff that detects different signals and stuff like that, but then this year we're going around now thinking, all right, we don't have, we have the net new and ABX stuff. How do we now look at the expansion piece, and so in my mind, when you think about online communities, for example, and this is just one play, it's one channel we have all kinds of engagement when you think about, Logging into the platform when you think about asking questions, answering questions, downloading PDFs, coming to a community webinar show, whatever, and going deep into the product and then things like that.
Chris: So now we're starting to look at those point is [00:05:00] how do you think about, the, from, you've been a CCO in the past, and and, thinking about that customer engagement and thinking about the expansion piece. How do you think about that? What's your
Jay: thoughts?
Jay: You want to do an interesting statistic and Nicole, I bet you could share some stories from Zendesk as well, but 75 percent of salesforce. com revenue growth this year will come from their customer base. It won't come to the new customers because as a company gets larger and you see how large sales forces, tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue.
Jay: But you have to start selling multiple products and you have to start harvesting opportunity out of your customer base. It's so much less expensive to do that. Because you don't have the marketing overhead of going to attract. Attention and interests from people who don't know who you are yet.
Jay: And so this is a really important concept, not just for. The team to own those quotas and those accountabilities for expansion. It's an important concept for the entire business, [00:06:00] especially. Where we find ourselves now what's happened over the past 4 years is that you've had this giant run up in valuations of software companies, right?
Jay: We've all been in it. We've all seen it. Yeah. And now, that's come crashing back down to earth when interest rates went up 525 basis points between, fall of 2022 and 2023. August of 2023, I think, yeah, it changed the game a little bit because money wasn't as free flowing anymore.
Jay: And so what that meant was, everybody's getting smarter about their budgets. They're tightening up. CFOs have more power. And when that happens, growth slows and when growth flows, profitability becomes more important. And so now that we're in this profitable, efficient growth mode. We have to be working more closely with our customers.
Jay: So if you have multiple products, you have to be really figuring out how to go take those products to your customers first and then to the rest of the market to drive that expansion. I don't know if I veered off your question, but that's the backdrop that we're all dealing with right now.
Jay: And to the [00:07:00] extent that you have additional products to sell, that it is critical right now to do that, to drive growth. I
Nicole: think you make some great points on there, Jay. You called out that sort of. Industry rule, which is that it is much more efficient and much cheaper to expand a business with an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.
Nicole: And of course you always have to have the balance because existing customers will turn over time and you always have to have some new people coming in. But it is critical, especially when you're trying to be really efficient, try to get to profitability, to be able to sell into your existing customer base.
Nicole: And as you said, it's important to every part of the business because it's not just about selling into that customer base, making sure they're realizing value. But also making sure your product team is helping to reduce friction with the product and make sure that it's serving the existing customer base's needs.
Nicole: It's making sure that those customers can get the support and the help that they need, and they can connect with other people that can talk to them about all of that. And so that's where there's so many great intersections between community and some of those other parts of the business. [00:08:00]
Chris: Yeah. How do you think about,
Jay: Go ahead, Jay.
Jay: Sorry, I hope we can edit this. I'm gonna go shut my door real quick. Cause my family just got home.
Chris: No, we're not.
Chris: We'll definitely edit this
Nicole: You don't want to put this on youtube chris, no, there you go. There we
Chris: go How do you think? So let's get back in the mode here now. How do you think when you think of
Chris: The expansion pieces. What do you think about like, how do you not just operationalize it? But how do you start?
Chris: Selling that, is it, whose responsibility is it? You could say it's everybody's responsibility, but in some companies, it's the AE's responsibility is a CSM's responsibilities. How do you know, how do you start thinking about who owns that piece? And then how do you start getting them?
Chris: To think about working with others within the company.
Jay: Yeah. To both of your points [00:09:00] expansion really is the thing that is going to move the needle not just for the company, but for the customer too. I had an interesting conversation just this morning.
Jay: I'll veer off for just a second. Then I'll come back to your question, Chris. Okay. In this friend of mine was basically talking through the concept of gross retention being the target for a customer success team or any existing, customer. Hey, that's fine, but here's the problem with having that is your North star gross retention is going to cause you gross retention.
Jay: Let's define that. 1st gross retention is keeping the existing customers and revenue that you have. At the beginning of a period to the end of a period, basically, forget about what you add, forget about new business coming in. It's just all about your existing customer base and the existing revenue base.
Jay: Oh, the whole hard reality of our industry is that all the customers that we bring in are not necessarily part of our ideal client profile, meaning they have things that make them not a perfect fit for our [00:10:00] products. Yeah. If we're doing everything in our power to. Make product adjustments to go save those customers were actually and I didn't come up with this.
Jay: This is my friend, Dan sparing who was brilliantly articulated this to me this morning. In fact, so I'm glad I could talk about it, but he's you're getting pull off of your product market fit. All the time, if you're only focused on gross retention, but when you're talking about expansion, then you have an opportunity to add more value to the customer to give them additional capabilities that they need and really building towards something you want to be building to as a company.
Jay: Anyway, just a side note there, I think, having an expansion motion is more than just growing. It's actually about continuing to move your company down the path of the. Platform of the product that you want to be in the long run. How do you operationalize expansion? I think the way that a lot of companies look at it.
Jay: There's really only a handful of models out there, right? You either have account executives that. Run like a key accounts team where they own the [00:11:00] initial sale and they own any expansion that comes afterward have more of the traditional what we would all think of is more traditional account executive model where they do the new business portion.
Jay: And as soon as that deals close, it's handed off. Maybe they keep the deal for 12 months. Or keep the account in their name for 12 months until they have the opportunity to go drive some of that expansion. If they don't drive expansion within that time period, then it might transition over to an account manager who would also be living in sales, but is responsible for, any expansions, potentially renewals as well.
Jay: Then you've got a flavor of account management that is clearly. Renewals and expansion. I was actually talking to a CRO yesterday and he implemented that model. His account managers, account management team owns both the renewal and the expansion. And I asked him this question. I said, did you have the right people on your team to implement that model?
Jay: He said, no, we had to replace the whole team to be able to do that because they had account managers that thought like hunters and they just wanted to go, harvest [00:12:00] meals out of the customer base. Wrong mindset, right? Because you can't treat your customers like you should. You should treat all customers the same and prospects, in my opinion, but you really can't treat your paying customers as if they're just another transaction.
Jay: That's a recipe for disaster. And then you've got, there's a
Nicole: quote right there,
Jay: a
Nicole: critical point. You can't treat people like transaction. You have to remember that you're dealing with real human beings in every part of these interactions.
Jay: That's right and some of those human beings, you already have a relationship with contractually.
Jay: You want the place now, then you have a customer success model. Which is. You've got who are more product experts. They're going to be making sure that the customer's getting the value out of the product that they're that they need. But, it. In a lot of cases, what they're doing is not owning that expansion motion per se, but they're identifying the opportunity and then they're feeding that into the sales channel to go drive it now.
Jay: Yeah, I think that's right. More and more CSM teams are taking on that [00:13:00] account management role. And I think it's a good fit actually, because the reality is a lot of what customer success teams do today. I have a whole diatribe on this, so we can get sure
Chris: of it too.
Jay: But what I see a lot of customer success teams doing today is actually white glove support.
Jay: It's not customer success as I define it. And I think if that's the case and you just need a bigger support team, you need a better support team. Put that there, maybe even a premium. Premier support ring so that you can have this clear separation of people who service the product and who helped the customer get it right.
Jay: And then you have people who sell things and manage the relationship with the customer.
Chris: I'll have, I have one little thing is I think support is underrated. And I think that it's probably one of the hardest jobs and. I don't think a lot of companies do it well. And the last thing I'll say is that if you do it that's half the battle.
Chris: If you had [00:14:00] amazing support, I think that the company can go a long ways in those renewals and things like that. Yeah. All the other things matter too, but I'm just saying I've seen so many companies just suck at support. You know what I mean? And it's just, and it's a big deal and you can't get people to invest in it.
Chris: Cause you'll have these people that. They're good people, but they're young and they don't know. If you have this enterprise software kind of stuff that is super technical, how are they going to know, so it's
Nicole: just. Always like that challenge with support where it's even the best trained agent probably hasn't done the thing that the customer is trying to do before.
Nicole: They may be seeing examples of it. They've read up on the technical documentation. They can tell you the settings that you need to implement to do it. And I think that's where all of these customer relationships come in. Whether you're doing that through a community or customer references or stories, but being able to actually get users talking to each other to understand those pieces and help build those relationships, because, Hey, I don't know what your experience with them, but most of the companies that I have [00:15:00] worked at, or been really familiar with, they only have customer support managers for their biggest account.
Nicole: And then there's a whole segment of a customer base. Where you're trying to do some kind of like scaled or digital success. And that's where I think those user to user relationships can help augment the brand to use their relationships and continue to
Chris: build that. I'll give one example. I sent a support case to a company a few weeks ago and I said, Hey, I needed an approach on how to do this from your APIs and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Chris: And the email I got back was here's the APA documentation. I'm like, That's not helpful. That doesn't help
Nicole: me know how to do that, right? That
Jay: wasn't a company I used to work for, was it, Chris?
Chris: No comment. I'm just saying just, it was like, it just pissed me off more than anything, but it's not just that, but it's just, I think if you have good support or they can help you get what you need, I think that's just half, that's a big part, a big plus, in an organization like ours and yours and so forth.[00:16:00]
Jay: I'm almost seeing if you want to be able to bring it back to the expansion. Yeah, sorry. No, it's great. Cause it all ties together. It all does. No, this is where we talk about blurring the lines, right? It all ties together. But if people aren't getting a good experience and don't know how to really take advantage of what they've already bought from you, do you think they really want to buy more from you?
Jay: No, don't. And then Nicole, to your point, If you can find a way of everybody has to have people, I think, have tried to get away from the idea of having a support team for a long time. And I think customer success is come in and from the side, and maybe disrupted that a little bit, but having a great support team allows you to do a lot of things.
Jay: And if you have a community that's sitting on top of it. You get together. Then if a question comes up in public, and there's a question about a certain capability or trying to do a certain task with the software that gets asked in front of everybody or in the community itself then other customers are going to come in and say Yeah, they have a [00:17:00] product that does what you're asking about.
Jay: You need to buy that. And that's where the community lends itself to expansion. That's where some of those leads might come from. But other than that, of course, in these scaled methodologies and with your support team, which I count as a scaled methodology for customer. Service customer support, customer success.
Jay: You, one of the big things that these teams need to be doing is looking for those opportunities to expand with the customer and identifying and then teeing it up. And the way that is operationalized to come all the way back to your question is really through an internal lead generation system of some sort.
Jay: We actually, I was with a company called BlackBaud, big software, Profit nonprofit software company, billion dollars in revenue a year. And, I was there from 2005 to 2013, almost 2014. We had a really robust internal lead program where anybody from support to professional [00:18:00] services to. The sales team got paid on the deals.
Jay: But anybody could get a spiff for sending a lead in where they saw a need that the customer had, that we had a product that would fit it and, you can get comped for that. That's important that everybody be on the lookout for it. Yeah,
Chris: I think I look at the operationalization of all of that stuff.
Chris: I think it's for us, it's bigger, right? As you grow, things have to become, when you're a very small company, you're just, everybody's just trying to go sell some stuff and make sure there's a product, but when I look at. Like I'll give an example since I'm doing this today when I look at community and I think, as we all know, community engages our users.
Chris: We answer questions. We do different programs to connect them and all of these things. And, one of the things I think is important as a community leader. Is operationalizing that and then showing the business outcomes of what the community is doing from either net new [00:19:00] cross it for me it's net new and expansion, right and the big play for me is expansion and a smaller play, which maybe that grows over time is net new, but there's still opportunity in both and actually proving it out and showing it so like example one of.
Chris: And Nicholas heard me talk about this 1000 times, but one of the biggest. Programs that I have from a, getting people together is my community show program or webinar program. And what that does is on a weekly basis ish, we sometimes go deep into the product, show people how to use it, do all these things because we're an enterprise company and there's lots of opportunity to teach them and getting others together and say I've done this and that, and getting access to the experts and things like that, but since I've been doing that for almost three years, I've been able Now there's an opportunity to, Reltio is growing, and we want to grow in our expansion pieces.
Chris: We're coming up with some new products. We're doing some upsells, cross sells. So why not on those shows show, [00:20:00] the new product, right? Hey, this is going to do this thing. And, this is what's really cool. And that's an upsell opportunity. Now I had a hundred people show up for one upsell like live, and then that goes directly into a. Goes into our zoom, right? And then it goes into Salesforce. Every opportunity that's already open or opens that user goes directly and is pushed to the opportunity. And then it pushes into Tableau. And then I can say, our community shows are 30 million or generating an influence pipeline, 30 million.
Chris: And not just that, it then also says. A BDR or a renewal rep or whatever can go into our dashboard and say, you know what? There's these opportunities open and these five people or three people from company A, B, and C that's already a customer have went to a community show, they downloaded this thing, and they did all this stuff.
Chris: So there might be time for us to go and, You know, especially if they went. So my thinking is operationalizing these [00:21:00] things are important over time, or at least to have a plan. So as a community leader, no longer is it enough for us to, build content, build engagement programs and all those things, although it's still our job.
Chris: How do we get it up there? I said a lot of stuff there. And it's mainly just.
Jay: I think that you're spot on the irony of the community, in my opinion, is that it almost feels like it could be a little insular, right? Nobody
Nicole: else, we're here to break that down. That's exactly right.
Nicole: We're expanding beyond the community space in our conversation. Cause we, we do have to break it down. And I think you're right, Jay. It can be a little bit like our own special, unique thing instead of being like, Hey, we're part of all of the business, but continue
Jay: with your thoughts. No. Yeah. Like you're exactly right.
Jay: If you feel like everybody else doesn't understand you, that means you probably don't understand everybody else. By the way. I'll say the same thing about customer success people. You can say the same [00:22:00] thing about marketing people, everything. Everybody gets the blinders on, right? Salespeople, nobody understands how hard our job
Nicole: is.
Nicole: And especially when you get you're under pressure, you're low on resources, you're busy, I constantly see teams that are trying to put boundaries around their work so that they're not constantly overwhelmed and behind, but as a result, end up being very focused on their OKR, their work, their process.
Nicole: There's a tendency to want to pull back from collaboration because you have to go slower, right? It's that thing if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go further, go with other people. But I totally butchered that thing, but you got it. But people tend to want to do that. And I'm like, I'm constantly, I know in my own team or myself across my organization, pushing people like, Hey, I know it's going to slow us down a little bit, but if we can connect those dots.
Nicole: We can share resources. It will be better for the customer experience. We can connect the dots between all those things. And I'm constantly harping on don't ship your org chart, by which I mean, don't put out a program because it [00:23:00] meets your OKR. If there's another team that's doing almost exactly the same thing, join forces, blend your OKRs together, whatever you got to do.
Nicole: But Bring that together. Don't silo it off so
Jay: much. If your org chart that's my quotable quote for you. There you go
Nicole: Yeah So jay, you know as we're talking about these things What are some of the things that you would encourage teams? To think about or how to put this in action because I think it's one thing for us to say, Hey guys, don't put your blinders on.
Nicole: Don't silo yourself. Don't ship your org chart. What does that look like in practice? And how would you recommend people think about that?
Jay: Yeah. I've got a recommendation for somebody else I think you all should talk to on your podcast. Okay, good. We always,
Nicole: we're looking for our next guest,
Jay: Hey, there you go.
Jay: Nisha Bhi from Gong? Yes. I'm having coffee with her next week. Okay, good. Yeah, you know her. She's the master at this kind of thing. And but what you're really doing is. I believe [00:24:00] that probably. 50 to 70 percent of a community managers job is. Internal change management and bringing the organization along with you because you can't as a community leader.
Jay: You cannot do it all yourself. You actually need a small army of people with the product knowledge, the industry knowledge. That's how you make a community valuable, right? By bringing together all that knowledge in 1 place. And usually the community manager is a facilitator, which is what makes the job really hard, right?
Jay: You have to be a good influencer versus somebody who controls everything. Because Chris, I'm sure you've picked up a ton of domain knowledge over the past three years. Sure. I see you all the time on LinkedIn. You're pulling in people from your company to do webinars. You're pulling customers in.
Jay: Yeah, we, my business partner, we, we started customer success community years ago and it was called gang grow, retain and still run by higher logic, by the way. If you're in CS or [00:25:00] community go join, it's great, but we always used to call it be the DJ, not the talent. Yeah. Because you can't be the talent, you have to be the person that brings it all together, the facilitator.
Jay: And that's hard work, because you're dealing with people, so
Nicole: Yeah and it's, you see all these community teams that are talking about they're under resourced, they're a team of one or two. And yet I know I said on last week, I made a list of all the capabilities that I needed on my team.
Nicole: And I'm like, this is a small business, right? I need people that can write copy, that can put events together, that can do technical administration, that can do analysis and reporting, that have executive communication, like, All of these skill sets. And it really brought home that point to me of you're never going to staff all of that within your team, right?
Nicole: No, no business is going to build out an entire sub business within the organization. It was very few are maybe, with the exception of something like the size of Salesforce. And that is why it is so critical to work cross functionally and lean into those other resources, because you're not [00:26:00] going to get it all on a community team.
Nicole: It wouldn't make sense from a business perspective. It makes a ton more sense to have the community team serve as a center of excellence. But then work across the organization to implement everything and really get it all done.
Jay: Yeah. And how, like what's in it for them, right? How do you incentivize people to be part of it?
Jay: And so you have to think through those things if you want to enlist their help. They have a day job right now. This could be part of their day job. If you do it, right? 1 of the things I've seen, actually, even back to my blackboard days, we had a blackboard what I would consider 1 of the most robust knowledge bases I've ever seen in my life and that's because 400 person support team, part of their incentive structure was everybody.
Jay: No matter how junior you were held accountable to creating knowledge base. Based content based on the kind of stuff you were feeling on the phone and guess what? That knowledge base was huge as a [00:27:00] result. I think you could build incentives in you could build requirements in, but you have to go collaborate with.
Jay: The leaders in those departments to say, hey this is important to the business that we build this out. How do we make part of how can we make it both, an incentive for your team to participate in a requirement for your team to participate in a way that aligns with the work that they do on a day to day basis.
Jay: That's where you get leverage. So community can be a huge leverage point as long as it's not in a little silo. Yeah.
Chris: And in this case, expansion and kind of going back to the expansion piece, if you have a team, which I'm sure you've had people report into several different companies, but what's your, Hey, look, we need to go and expand in these accounts, maybe what is your thing to them?
Chris: What are you saying to them to really. What is like a strategy look like around that? If you were to
Jay: do that, question. Um, very tactically, the 1st thing you have to do, if you're going to go expand and [00:28:00] by the way someone should be doing this work in your organization.
Jay: And if they're not, and you're a community leader, and you think it's, there's a valuable opportunity there, then maybe you can help spearhead some of this, but the 1st thing to do is go get a list of your customers and understand where there is expansion opportunity. When you go to sell into the market, you have to qualify any prospect you talk to, like the product that we're selling at the company I'm at today, Cherokee.
Jay: Yeah. We sell to a lot of SAS companies, but if there's some conditions that if you don't, if you're not meeting those conditions or those criteria, then you're actually not a prospect for us. So we need to figure that out very quickly. You do the same thing with your customers, right? You have product a, which customer already uses.
Jay: Then you have product B. Is that a fit for custom, the customer or not? Yeah. And then what is the universe of customers where that could be a fit? How do you go, put that product in front of them? You do campaigns right through, through your marketing efforts. You [00:29:00] set up webinars to help people understand what those capabilities are, and you can aim them directly at your customers.
Jay: If you use product A and you have this problem, then come check out product B, right? I think it, it gets very tactical very quickly. A lot of times people confuse. Strategy and execution. Thing, right? Who's planning to win? We have this huge segment of customers that doesn't have product B.
Jay: How do we go get their attention and start talking to them about product B and then generate pipeline from that? I think it all starts with the data. You have to actually look at your customer base in detail and then understand what cohorts you have. When I was at higher logic we had a lot of different products.
Jay: And one of the things that we did, and actually our chief product officer spearheaded this effort at the time, but he looked at all the different cohorts of customers that we had by their product attachment, where they had our flagship products, where they had other products. And hold on a second.[00:30:00]
Jay: And we've
Nicole: all been there with work from home. You got to have that two minutes. I'll be done.
Chris: Yeah.
Jay: Yeah but once you know what the attachment is of the different product sets, then you can figure out, okay, what else do these customers need? What is the same about this block of customers and how do we go market and sell a product to them in a way that feels like you're marketing to a customer, not a prospect.
Jay: You sound like an executive,
Chris: man. I love it. This is exactly a lot of that stuff you just said is exactly what we're, we've been doing this year and really focusing on. So I love what you just said. So
Nicole: this has been insightful. I feel like we've all had some great takeaways. I'm going to throw a little curveball at you.
Nicole: This is a new podcast. We're still playing around a little bit with our format, but I would love to ask you just like some quick questions to wrap up if I could. All right. Great. So I know I love reading. Books that help me think about work in different ways, not necessarily business books. [00:31:00] You have one book title that you would recommend that people should read to help them out, whatever their professional
Jay: life looks like.
Jay: I have one book that I have been recommending a lot lately. It's called good strategy, bad strategy. And it's this whole idea of like your plan to win and the execution behind it. So I'll leave it at that, but good strategy. It's a good,
Nicole: We'll put that in the show notes for people as well, if you want to track that down.
Nicole: And then what is one habit or ritual or process that you have figured out that really helps make your days easier or more
Jay: productive? 1 of the things I like to do is right. If you want to be good at anything, you should just do it every day. Do it 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes a day. And for me, for writing, I try to write something every single day.
Jay: I don't know that it makes me more productive, but. Actually, the 1 thing I will say about writing, if you do choose to do writing is it [00:32:00] clarifies your thinking when you actually thoughts out of your head and you put them in black and white so that you can see, and you actually have to think about it clearly enough to actually put it down into words.
Jay: It will change you. It'll change the way you think.
Chris: And so is writing still a thing. Because, ChatGPT can do all that stuff, right?
Jay: But it can't
Nicole: think for you. That's the one thing it can't do, Chris. And I, Jay, I love that, I'll tell you. I free write. Anytime I'm trying to solve a difficult problem, I just open up a blank Word doc, and I just start typing what I'm thinking, and bulleting things out, and half the time that's the basis for an executive brief I end up doing.
Nicole: A few weeks later or something like that. So I'm with you. I agree. Pro tip
Jay: here. If you want to do a great presentation, don't start with PowerPoint slides, start with narrative of what you're trying to say, and then it'll be very easy to create once you have that narrative outline. Because
Nicole: they're just the pictures that go along with the thing you wrote down, right?
Nicole: They're just, we give the examples. Exactly. All right, Chris, do you have any quick questions you want to ask Jay before we
Jay: [00:33:00] wrap up here?
Chris: I don't, this has been really great, Jay, and I didn't write