Bryan McAnulty:

Your podcast is more than a content channel. What if it could help you build relationships, find customers, create partnerships, and even shape the future of your business?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

We've got almost 300 incredible people like you on the show that are building businesses, or they're executives, or they're CEOs, or they're C-level leaders. We started doing more and more content projects for people. Now we've worked with over 200 companies across the world.

Bryan McAnulty:

That's exactly what Adrian Brady-Cesana has done. Adrian is the founder of CXChronicles, a company that helps businesses improve their customer experience through four key pillars: team, tools, process, and feedback.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

What we've really moved forward into is helping people think about the four pillars: team, tools, process, and feedback optimization. Customer experience is modern selling.

Bryan McAnulty:

He has also hosted almost 300 episodes of the CXChronicles Podcast, where he interviews founders, CEOs, and customer-focused leaders about what it really takes to build companies people trust.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

It takes so long. It's so hard. Everything's harder than you think. More than ever, you've got to love the [expletive] out of your customers.

Bryan McAnulty:

Today we're going to talk with Adrian about why customer experience is one of the biggest growth levers in business, how podcasting helped him grow CXChronicles, and what founders need to understand about AI, customers, and trust as business keeps changing.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

What are you going to do to ensure that you survive the next thousand days? The reality is the maestros are going to be the winners in the next thousand days.

Bryan McAnulty:

AI is at the top of everyone's mind right now. But if you imagine a year or two from now where everybody's got access to the same AI agents, where we can just press a button and they do all the work for us, then there's an important question we need to ask: what makes your business different or better than your competitors?

I believe it comes down to how you do things. I believe that in business, how we do things will be everything in this age of AI. So I started asking founders this question, and something surprising happened. These conversations were so valuable that I knew I had to share them. This is why I'm starting this new series inside The Creator's Adventure called Founder Stories.

Hey everyone, I'm Bryan McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it.

Hey Adrian, welcome to the show.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Hey Bryan, how are you doing, man?

Bryan McAnulty:

Glad to talk with you again. I got to talk with you on your show a few weeks back. I get to have you on here.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Man, we had an awesome time having you on the CXChronicles Podcast. Guys, fully candid, Bryan and I caught up the other week. We were supposed to record, and we literally nerded out for an hour talking about a lot of stuff we're going to talk about today, the future of AI and all this stuff. I'm pumped to jump on the show, pumped to be a part of it, and pumped to get into the good stuff today with you.

Bryan McAnulty:

Awesome. That's a great point. This is our second conversation, an attempt to record this episode, just because we took so long last time we didn't get to recording.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

We're both musicians. We're founders. We're builders. There are a lot of things to talk about here, bro.

Bryan McAnulty:

Yes. My first question for you is: if every business has access to the same magic AI agent that you press a button and it's going to do the work for you, then what makes your company different than others, or better than others, in terms of the way you actually operate behind the scenes?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

I love that question. There are a couple thoughts I immediately jump to. Number one, all of us are learning a ton about AI. Some of us are further ahead than others. Some of us have been using it, building it, and leveraging it for years and years. Some of us are just jumping on and starting to figure out how to catch on and ride the damn thing.

Over the years, as I've been learning more about this at industry events and conferences, and being able to see some incredibly smart and experienced people across the world speak about this and talk about it with their businesses, groups, or investments, one of the first things I've pulled out on my own is the notion of one of the first differentiators.

Bryan, as you remember on the CXChronicles Podcast, we talked about the Four CX Pillars. We talked about team, tools, process, and feedback. I'm going to jump right to the third pillar of process. I always joke about it being the least sexy of the four pillars, and people don't think it's important.

But when you look backwards at the traditional way companies would capture tribal knowledge, things employees needed to know about everything they had to do, the way the team was structured, how the tools were leveraged or supposed to be used, standard operating procedures, living playbooks, all this stuff. Then you get to the customer side, and you think about FAQs, community knowledge, and all the different ways customers can try to get information to figure it out on their own. Or maybe they're doing a shop, right, Bryan? A lot of smart, sophisticated buyers will go that deep and start to dig into some of the current users to see what their experiences are, to see if that's a solution they want.

The first thing I'm going to get to is this notion: I think it's still early, where people don't think about it. If everyone's going to be building different AI solutions, and everyone's using the same AI tools and some of the same models to get ripping into the building phase and the building boom we're seeing right now, one of the first things I think about is: what is the information, or what is the substance? Literally, guys, what are the words? What is the sentiment? What are the literal words that are going to fuel that AI engine?

I think about comparing it to fuel, almost to a gasoline brand. When you roll up at the pump and you've got 87, 89, 93, maybe you're going to put 93 into your Porsche, and you're going to put 87 into your F-150, right? Just an example. I think the first differentiator, and again, only some of the smartest and brightest companies on planet Earth are even thinking about it this way, is how you're going to build your fuel.

Said another way, it's the information that's going to be ingested and leveraged to do all of the things downstream. I'll stop there, but that's the first big piece you don't hear a lot of people talking about. This is absolutely something everyone listening today should be thinking about for your business. There are certain things you were a subject matter expert at as a founder, or something you built, or a [unclear] you're providing, that you had knowledge about, bringing a solution to a big space of a problem. That's the first thing. I'll stop there because I know it's a lot.

Bryan McAnulty:

No, that's great, though, and it's a great point. It's a great way to describe it. In the software-building world, we talk about this idea of context engineering, and how it's not just about one prompt anymore. It's about how you're taking all this knowledge you have and getting the right information to the AI at the right time.

The thing it seems you and I are trying to communicate here that some people overlook is that it's not just, okay, I have this knowledge, but I tell the AI to do something for me. You have to understand what parts of that specialized knowledge and information you have you need to impart to the AI, and when that's necessary. Remind the AIs you're working with that they need that from you. They shouldn't just go off. If there's something they're missing, they've got to ask you about that and make sure that what you're communicating to your customers, to potential buyers, all of that, comes from this unique experience and knowledge you have.

Real quick, Bryan here. You know me as the host for this podcast, but what you might not know is I'm also the founder of Heights Platform. It's an online platform that over 10,000 creators have used to build their online courses, communities, and digital product businesses. We recently added some awesome updates to Heights AI to help you turn your idea into a viable business. Heights AI can build entire product offers, review your content, and even coach you on how to grow. You can try it for free for 30 days. Links in the description. Now, back to the podcast.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

One hundred percent. That is one of the first key differentiators. How do you start? What do you do? Bryan, for a lot of the folks tuning in to your show today, this is why you hear so much talk about founder content, or founder content creation. There are so many people who agree that tomorrow's—well, we'll see, the definition of unicorn might change over the next thousand days—but tomorrow's leading companies, if they don't have a founder or a founding team thoughtfully curating content, and knowing from the front end that not only is that going to serve as a marketing asset, something you can get out into the world to create awareness and consideration from your buying market, dude, that's the beginning of literally refining your own oil.

What's funny, man, is with my whole journey over the last six years of building CXChronicles, I've had this incredible opportunity to talk to almost 300 incredible people like you on the show who are building businesses, or they're executives, CEOs, or C-level leaders in all sorts of incredible companies.

This topic you and I are on, and we've talked about it a couple times now, is one you still don't see a lot of these people actually thinking about that way. There's a big shift in the seat and role of CMOs across the world. I'm not just saying this because I'm a CX nerd and I've spent the last 20-plus years thinking about customer experience, customer success, customer support, customer selling, and customer services. Antiquated CMOs focused on the top of the funnel. Modern CMOs—or frankly, this is why you've seen such an emergence of CXOs or CSOs, chief experience officers, chief success officers—they're following the entire customer journey.

They're not just worried about the top of the funnel, but thinking all along the way. Getting back to differentiation, I promise I'm not drawing too far from where we started. If all of us are doing the same damn thing, that messaging, what's going to go into it, and the humans or characters you're going to put into that play, whatever your business is, matter.

If you're a public company, you've got a whole different cast and crew, and you're on Broadway. If you're a small, scrappy, five-person agency and you're still working on your first million bucks a year, that's an awesome opportunity. That means the team or the founder can be the primary actor in the play. Those thinking about this thoughtfully right now are also going to stumble upon all these other opportunities for future language models, the way we'll enhance future language models or add to them. Bryan, you and I were talking about this the other day, and you know a lot more about this than me, but starting to customize language models to serve a purpose, whatever that purpose might be. That's one of the biggest ones.

I'll give you my second one, then I'll stop on this front. Humans are absolutely going to be part of the last mile. Bryan, you've gotten to know me over the last couple months. I'm a firm believer that in the next—it's crazy how fast this year's going, we're about to be in August, guys. At the beginning of this year, I started talking about it on the show, with our clients at CXChronicles: we've got about a thousand days.

I'm not trying to sound crazy like an Elon or someone like that, but granted, those people know a hell of a lot more than we do, so maybe we should listen to them. In my world of customer experience, customer success, and customer support, I don't see a way that in the next thousand days we don't see a massive shift in the need for people.

I know for a fact, as you came on our show and spoke to the CX Nation, we've got a bunch of CX and CS leaders and nerds who are likely going to be some of the best-suited folks. I say it all in the Pareto: there could be 20% of us asked to do another 80% of people's jobs in the next thousand days. The human part of that has never been more paramount.

That human will be the one managing the prompting and the logic you and I were talking about. The second piece is, at the end of the day, to close a deal, renew a deal, or win that client, there are still ultimately going to be a few milestone moments in your customer or user journey where a human's got to do something, or it's got to feel like a human is doing something. Those are the big differences.

Bryan McAnulty:

If your competitor has a human doing something, they're going to be the one who closes the sale.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Very much so. Remember, there's still a huge base of people sitting in decision-making chairs or leadership roles, who own the keys to the purse, who aren't buying this [expletive]. I'm not trying to be ageist at all, but many of our friends, family, and people we love are in their fifth, sixth, and seventh decades.

I'm a huge fan of battle-tested experience. Nothing's better than living life, and the deeper you get into it, the more you know about life. I firmly believe that. But we're still in a position where there are a bunch of people in the market where there's going to be pushback. That human touch, to your point, is a huge opportunity for the right companies.

Bryan McAnulty:

I think it's a huge opportunity for creators. The smaller companies and solo entrepreneurs right now are in such an excellent position to take advantage of this. The founder content, this information you're talking about, is not only the thing models need for training data, because no one's interested in you putting out AI slop content everybody already knows about. Everybody's interested in what's happening now. What are the thoughts, processes, and ideas going through people's heads now?

Being able to share that expertise is not only what is maybe relevant to get you to show up in a ChatGPT search or something, but it's also what other people want to hear about. You're at a huge advantage to be able to communicate that. What we're trying to talk about here is that everything flipped.

It used to be that big companies had this advantage: they're able to deploy and build something at such a scale that simply having the scale is the business. The product could be kind of bad, but because they're able to do this at scale, the business exists. That has completely gone away now, because anyone can have the scale. Anyone can have what was supposed to be one of the most challenging things. Anyone can spin that up overnight, almost.

The advantage is the uniqueness and the new ideas. It's not just about, oh, I made this piece of software or this piece of information anyone could have had before. It's about how I can create these new things. I completely agree, downstream of everything, a human is going to be involved in buying it or interacting with it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

One hundred percent. One thing to add: the world of software as a service has grown into a behemoth over the last 20 years. Globally, companies are spending almost $1.3 trillion a year on software as a service. It's got a compound annual growth rate of 15% to 20%. You and I were joking about this the other day, Bryan, but now we're seeing some of these AI companies with the most explosive revenue growth I think the planet's ever seen. I'm not a Wall Street expert, but have we ever seen this type of revenue growth from any other business this fast?

Bryan McAnulty:

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

The velocity. When you say it like that, there's this interesting thing that's also going to happen at the same time. Everyone talks about the SaaS apocalypse. There's a ton of stories and yammering out there about the SaaS apocalypse. I think it's kind of true. I think any B and C software is [expletive] toast, pardon my French. Toast.

But I also think what's confusing is, jump back on what you just said, Bryan, where SMBs now have this lever they've never truly had before to disrupt, or to find things to disrupt, and they move fast and swift. We've also just seen the largest companies on planet Earth that are providing us with this superpower growing at a clip we never even thought about. You hear private equity and venture capitalists across the world who are all positive some of these things are going to be trillion-dollar companies. They weren't an entity seven years ago, some of them.

That's going to be interesting to see. Is it a SaaS apocalypse? Is it this AI renaissance and tsunami? Or is it something we just haven't figured out how to normalize yet and what to call it? That's where my Pareto, the 20% of us who are going to be tomorrow's leaders, comes in. That's what we're figuring out in these next thousand days.

All of us need to, regardless of our crafts or wherever our subject matter expertise lies, be thinking about that. Bryan, you've been building for years, way before AI. You've been engineering, developing this stuff, and you've built a bunch of different companies. For me, I was a nontechnical founder. I spent 20 years building customer-facing teams, managing them, building out and scaling the tech stack, then building the processes and playbook. Then, once we achieved scale and actually had customers, getting really good voice-of-customer feedback.

Fast-forward to now, I've got three or four tools that don't come off my docket every day. There is stuff I used to envision, think about, or want to conceptualize where I'd almost have to wait for an analyst, a developer, or one of my friends. Now I'm going to those people with something. I'm not saying all of it's beautiful.

I use Gemini for a lot of my thinking and strategic thoughts, a lot of aggregation of information, plus validation of information and sourcing. I've been using Lovable for quick and dirty: give me something visual, let me throw something in front of somebody so they have a visual, something to look at. Just like you, brother, for our content we've been leveraging Riverside.fm for the past year and change, and it's been an absolute game changer.

There are a few other odds-and-ends tools we're using, doing exploratory stuff, plus we have our strategic partners. At CXChronicles, we're partnered with some of the world's leading CX software providers: HubSpot, Intercom, Zendesk, Freshworks, some of those types of companies. Bryan, all of them are now bringing their solutions into this. It's a super interesting time for people who never really considered themselves tactical or technical leaders.

Bryan McAnulty:

Exactly. What you're getting at is, over the years, software and technology have improved to allow us to get a lot more done, easier and cheaper. The SaaS boom brought us to this point of, wow, I don't have to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars with a developer to build this thing.

That's part of what I did with Heights Platform. We made it so you can turn some knowledge you have into a business where you can sell online just using our software for $49 to [unclear] per month. You can do that, get ready to go with that.

But now we're seeing this big leap. If you started with this five or so years ago, you could still argue, okay, now I have the software tools. Hopefully, some are better than others, some have more of an all-in-one solution for me, but there are still a lot of things you have to set up and get ready in your business. If you don't have money or a team behind you, even with experience, it's very easy to say it's going to take me a year before I'm really ready to get this dialed in enough to promote it heavily to the market.

Now, with AI and all these tools we have today, it's pretty much press a button and go, almost. That's where we're getting to, where you get to make the actual impact and see an idea you have come into some form of reality right away, instead of all the busywork and things that go into setting up a company.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Absolutely no question about it. I told you on one of our last conversations, there are people like you and some of my friends who are extremely experienced senior developers and engineers, whether it's front end, back end, or both. One of my best friends in the world is an all-star because he works between both worlds.

When I think about where I'm getting, as the dancing bear and nontechnical founder I am, in this short period of time, I salivate at people like you or my friend who's a senior executive leader at a large company now. What I see as a layman, whether it's Claude, Replit—Gemini is different—more the Lovable, building-based solutions, easy-to-build apps and tools.

Guys, this is really good for all of you to think about, and you should pause this and go back and relisten. What I think about as a layman is, as I'm getting better at formulating logic to create prompts, then rethink logic, then reprompt, the reality is the maestros are going to be the winners in the next thousand days. We've entered a world where your ability to orchestrate, your ability to keep different things moving, has never been like this.

To your point, brother, with three or four tools you can literally build everything you want, at least a decent enough iteration that you could be in business overnight, like you just said. That's one thing.

But when I think about some of the senior folks out there, some of my friends I've worked with over the last 20 years who've risen to leadership roles in technology companies, I salivate. If I'm going through a building solution and give a prompt that ends up running me into three different things I get blocked at, X, Y, and Z, I can maybe figure out X. X is a thing where, hold on, what is that? Because I don't understand some of the language or things you guys have been doing for 20 years. Maybe I can figure that out real quick, or maybe even the tool can help me if I broke it.

Bryan McAnulty:

Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

X, I can solve it. A lot of times, what I'm seeing in this early phase of becoming a builder, or becoming more comfortable with what we're talking about, is that SMBs, man, get ready. Those of us who aren't afraid to do this, some of us are going to accidentally create billion-dollar companies. We're not even going to have big teams. We're going to be building these lightweight things that are wildly scalable, that just [expletive] work overnight. They just catch fire.

But Y and Z are where I often pause, or founders like myself hit that thing where they go back to the traditional, [expletive], I might have to call Bryan. I might have to email someone.

Bryan McAnulty:

This is where, for our audience, for anyone watching and listening, you have that advantage. With these AI tools, you can outsource your work, but you can't outsource your understanding.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Correct.

Bryan McAnulty:

While it can help you understand, if you have this unique skill or knowledge you've been involved in for so long, the speed at which you can move because you have that understanding in the first place will be completely outsized. You have this value in the marketplace.

Even if everybody has these AI tools with this capability, even if somebody else out there is more experienced with using AI than you are or more familiar with prompting, if they don't have the understanding you do, they still need your knowledge and experience in some way.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

You got it, man. One hundred percent. You see all the stuff about engineers being doomed, flocking to the beaches to surf because they think their lives are over. I disagree. That's a group where I'd be saying: do your day job, do whatever you've got to do to pay your bills, and then I'd be spending countless hours per day or per week dabbling, testing, iterating, looking at big spaces, big sets of data, and cranking.

What I see from the network I've built and all the friends I have is this flocking to preserve the best jobs. I'm like, you guys are crazy. Sure, go flock to the sexy unicorn. You might make a million bucks. Cool. Why don't you make 10 million bucks in the next thousand days?

Here's the other thing, and this is just me jaded, and this is why I built CXChronicles. After 20-plus years of working in all these incredible companies, I realized I've got to go do my own thing. You're not in control of anything if you don't own your business. We're about to go into this really wild climate of waters where, if we already didn't have control or a say in how things were going, it's about to get way worse, guys.

My best friend I was joking about, Bryan, I call him once a week: what have you built for me this week? I keep sending him things, and then joking, hey, man, I sent you that last week. You didn't email me back. Here's V2. What would you have done in one hour? Because that took me five hours. [Expletive] like that.

Now is the time. Bryan, I don't know the exact numbers, but the internet boom, the internet bubble, this is supposed to be five or 10 times. It's a huge number. There's a multiplier in the number of [unclear]. The people listening to this, the folks getting ideas, the folks who are creative and going to keep going, you will find something.

Bryan McAnulty:

It's a really exciting time. Everyone in the position of being a creator and entrepreneur is in the right position. I agree with everything you said. What people need to do, the engineers and people you're talking about who are worried about what's going to happen, is realize that what we were doing before is kind of solved. But that means we've gotten to a new level of problems that not only a company can potentially work on solving, but even an individual can work on solving.

If you go back 20 years, as the internet and e-commerce were becoming more of a thing, where people would spend money online, we were thinking bigger then about what we could actually do. Could I actually have my own e-commerce site or something?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty:

Back then it was an investment. It was, well, I've got to spend $40,000 to have an e-commerce site.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Yeah.

Bryan McAnulty:

Then I think we got too comfortable, almost. Now it's, okay, I understand that if I'm a solo entrepreneur, I could do these kinds of things. Everybody's got to reset a little bit and realize, let's think bigger. What's something you think is completely impossible for one person or a small team to solve? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's something you can actually do, and maybe you can do it rather quickly as well.

Focus on the bigger problems you're passionate about and that align with your skills in some way. Now you don't need the team and funding to do it. You have these AI tools that can help make that a reality.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Dude, Bryan, so well said. August makes six years of me founding CXChronicles, so only a few weeks away. We're almost July. When I started the business, I remember my founding problem was that companies in the U.S. alone were losing $62 billion a year due to poor customer experiences.

Fast-forward six years, and to your point, after going through—remember, guys, for me, similar to Bryan, I had this absolute luxury of being silly enough to start the CXChronicles Podcast six years ago because I was still sitting in my day job. I was working at ACV Auctions in downtown Buffalo, a company that has since gone public. It was an awesome company. I was working for our executive leadership team. I had one of the coolest jobs in the company doing customer experience.

I would travel around and meet auto dealers. I would travel around and meet our employees. I would do CX and EX at the same time. I got to work with product, sales, operations, and analytics. It was awesome. But it was really the role where I knew, all right, you've got to go. This is what you're good at. You love this.

I was in New York City for 10 years, too, working in a plethora of different professions. For me, it was, I'm going to go out and chronicle what other people are doing. I had worked for enough leaders and leadership teams, and I'm not saying this to be brash, but by the time we got to ACV, I had made far too many people decamillionaires. I was getting sick and tired of watching other people become [expletive] rich. Not that anything's wrong with that. I'm very proud of those people. Remember, nobody gets anything unless you take a massive risk.

This stuff takes time. It takes so much time. Everyone thinks it's overnight. That [expletive] is fake. It takes so long. It's so hard. Everything's harder than you think. For me, I started backwards, where I started doing the interviews, the early episodes.

Having all these conversations, we're almost to 300 episodes, but Bryan, I told you the other day, that was a thousand conversations with incredible, very smart people. I learned so much. It's really what showed us where a bigger thing was.

What started with the $62 billion customer experience problem, over time, not only doing the podcast but our business coming behind it once we started to get consulting opportunities and clients, we started doing more and more content projects for people. Now we've worked with over 200 companies across the world.

The problem in front of me and our team today, what you just said, something [expletive] big, a really big, hairy, audacious goal: the $62 billion customer experience problem became, wait a minute, we've got $1.27 trillion of spend annually, growing. We've got terrible, almost nonexistent utilization rates. Why? Tell me this: I don't care if you're doing a million bucks a year, 10 million, 100 million, a billion a year. How do you not know? Everybody knows what their tech spend is.

We're about to move forward in this world where, if you don't know your current tech spend, utilization, and generalized needs before going into these AI decisions and investments, you're crazy.

What we've really moved forward into, a lot of the work we do with clients, is helping people understand the four pillars: team, tools, process, and feedback optimization. The sweet spot and game changer for the last two or three years for us has been doing tech utilization audits and scorecards.

Some of the strategic partners I mentioned earlier, we try to focus on those because we know those tools intimately, inside and out. We've started to build our own tools that can audit. To your point, we're in this space where folks like us can do this stuff, be nimble, be creative, keep going through different doors, and keep learning.

Guys, it often takes longer and is harder than you think because the thing you set out to do is not where you're actually supposed to go. It sounds a little weird, but those of us who are rewarded—and this is why I have so much respect for any entrepreneur, business owner, or executive who's running the entity, even if it's not theirs—this stuff's hard.

To continue to go day after day when you run into blocker after blocker, constant challenges, is hard. That's why the reward for the 1% is the way it is. It's a long journey to get to this place and actualizing the value you knew was always there.

Bryan McAnulty:

You can only find that thing if you're able to really keep at it long enough.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

It's true.

Bryan McAnulty:

I agree. It is hard, but it is certainly worth it. I want to share with our audience, let's say they're listening to this and saying, Adrian sounds like he really knows what's going on in terms of what I should do around customer experience.

Speaking to somebody a bit earlier in their journey, they've got a couple customers and they're trying to figure out how to grow this business. As a new business, a new entrepreneur, one of the biggest levers you have is your customer experience, customer support, how you serve these customers, and your ability to serve them with better support than the big enterprise can.

Can you speak more to that, and maybe share where you realized, and how you would explain to somebody, that customer experience is not just support, but actually one of these big growth levers in your business?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Absolutely. What I always say, Bryan, is customer experience is modern selling. That's number one. Number two, when people ask me, Adrian, you talk to all these people about CX, what is it to you? I've gotten much quicker in answering this.

For me, customer experience, the reason why, if it's done well, strategically and pragmatically, is when you look at any customer experience, user experience, employee experience, strategic partner experience, vendor experience, it goes on and on. Executives who roll their eyes about customer journey mapping and user journey mapping, and say [expletive], and don't want to spend 20 grand on it or have their leadership team stuck in a conference room for a week, the thing they're missing is that customer experience becomes modern selling when somebody has led your team through the very difficult, arduous process of going through the different cuts of the customer journey or funnel.

Number one, awareness. How do people become aware of our [unclear]? How do people even know we're a thing? Then you get to consideration. Before I jump past awareness, think about all the analytics that go into awareness. All the top-of-the-funnel marketing analytics, impressions, content, all the things we focus on at the top of the funnel.

Then you move to consideration. This is where your salespeople come into play. Hey, we've got leads. Something came from the top. It got brought down further. It showed a signal that now we're in consideration mode. This is when marketing and sales start to come together to present an opportunity.

Think about all the analytics in the consideration camp, with your BDRs and SDRs. Qualification: is somebody in your ICP? Is somebody right? Is somebody not right? Can we make this work? Can we not?

Then you have awareness, consideration, conversion, our favorite part of the game. For all of us building companies, nothing's better than selling a deal, getting a new client. It's the best thing in the world. Think about all the conversion metrics out there. What's the longest sales cycle you've ever had? How many of you had to do 20 meetings to get a deal? Some of you are lucky because you built a thing where you do one or two meetings to get a deal. Some of our friends are selling high-value things, healthcare, software, some of the big stuff. We're talking about two years of your life to get that deal. Conversion, and all the things that fall into that.

Then you get into the world people are starting to think of as CX. You get into onboarding. This is where a lot of companies start to think, wait, CX picks up here. This is where support starts. Now you're in onboarding, thinking about the first 30, 60, 90 days. How are you going to make sure this person has an incredible experience so they stick?

Here's the other thing all of us know in our different camps. Your ability to keep a customer through a certain number of days, I don't care what your business is, there's a certain number of days we can find out very quickly, equals, in many cases, almost an 80% uptick in success for keeping that customer through. This is where it gets different. It might not be forever, but it might be through the first contract year.

Onboarding, then you move into account management. People think CX is, all damn day, essentially onboarding and account management. Account management is where the whole world of customer success has blossomed.

I love my CS people, and I am a CS person. That's an area, Bryan, when we think about areas ripe for change. When I was young, I was one of the CSMs who could do 10 times a book of business, manage it extremely well, and was smart enough to ask for more money instead of one of my senior leaders hiring another CSM. I was doing that 15 years ago, which got me realizing there's more systematic stuff to this.

Account management, and all the things going on there, is where our signals are. For most of our listeners, that world is where all your signals lie. Are there tickets? What are the communications? What are the activities? What is sentiment based on activities? How are we performing? How are we delivering value?

Remember, we're about to enter a world where, if you cannot articulate mathematically your value to a customer, good luck. Think about where we've had to move over six years with CXC. We have to literally deliver HubSpot utilization calculators to even get a consulting deal with a client. We have to show them, hey, this is what you're potentially losing, to get the CFO, CEO, or C-level executive sponsor to sign off on the contract.

Bryan McAnulty:

Go with the last thing, and I want to—

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Last is loyalty. Customer loyalty and customer retention. That's why CX is one of the coolest parts of any business. It's not simple. It can be as wildly complex as you want it, or as nonexistent and useless as you want it.

There are a lot of executives running different strategic ships. Some care about it and some don't. If you're preserving a company, you give a [expletive] about some of this stuff. If you're trying to grow a business, or sell a business and multiply it fast, you absolutely care about this stuff.

Bryan McAnulty:

I want to translate that. In my experience, some of our audience are unfortunately stopping at conversion. They have this incredible opportunity to focus on the customer experience side, and everything you just said, more than all the rest of it. You as the founder have the ability to deliver a better customer experience individually to these customers than any large company trying to figure out how to begin to explain to their employees and customer success team how to make that work.

They have a much bigger and harder problem of being able to do what you can do very easily by communicating with your customers in everything you do along the way.

The missing piece of why some newer entrepreneurs may say, okay, conversion, I just need sales—everybody needs some amount of sales to get going, right?—is that you need customer experience even if your product isn't recurring, just a one-time thing. The point is that you're probably going to have something to sell this person in the future as a secondary product.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Absolutely. Cross-sell.

Bryan McAnulty:

The people most likely to buy from you are your existing customers. You need them to have a good experience. You care about what you're doing. You're probably here to not just make money, but make some kind of impact. You want them to get that result.

You want to do the best you can to help make sure they go through the onboarding, your course, coaching, community, whatever it is, and get a positive result. It's not just about getting the money, then you win. It's about getting them the result, and now they're leaving glowing testimonials about how you made this impact on their lives, or telling all their friends about you and bringing you new customers.

If you don't have that, your job is a whole lot harder, constantly trying to bring people in, instead of creating such a good experience that the customers themselves help bring in more.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

One hundred percent. It's the power of promoters. In the CX world, we call it the power of promoters. Most of you have heard of NPS. Bryan, we had Fred Reichheld on the CXChronicles Podcast years ago. He's the godfather of NPS. He worked at Bain for 40 years.

If you can create a stable of promoters, you are so much better suited for success, because you can build everything off the promoters. You can build your downstream funnels off the promoters.

One thing I want to call out as you said all that so well goes back to your first question about differentiation. Here's another one. I've had some extremely technical guests on the podcast over the years: automation, automation, automation. Groovy. Awesome. I'm all about it, too.

But if you don't have sentiment analysis baked into that, or if you don't have what we used to call customer loops, a customer raises their hand and says they've got a problem. Somebody not only acknowledges there's a problem, gets them to a person, understands the problem, resolves it if needed, and closes the loop. Or the last thing is, hey, I've got to escalate this for you to talk to an executive. You're absolutely right, this is a big deal, and you just told me something they're going to understand is $100 million.

Automation, automation, automation gets further away from that. More than ever, you've got to love the [expletive] out of your customers. The customers you do have, who appreciate, take, and retain the value your business provides, in the world we're going into, more than ever they're going to cherish the folks doing that on a service side.

One last thing: part of what got me here today as we're talking about this, if I think back on my career, the number of customer phone calls, tickets, portfolio reviews, QBRs. As I got a little older and a little gray in my beard, unfortunately, once you're a director or VP, guess who gets to eat the escalations? That's horrible.

But it's kind of what made it. My time in New York, being in all these different CX roles, where I had to eat all these escalations. A lot of times, and I'm saying this now as a founder, not having a speck of power around how the terms and conditions would be construed afterwards, and not being at the top of the cap table. At that point in the career, I didn't have a big enough piece of the pie.

I'm saying this for people to think about, some of our folks are younger and listening. Every one of those conversations and uncomfortable scenarios, I was playbooking and starting to think about CXChronicles in terms of, wait a minute, this thing just happened at [unclear], this thing just happened at [unclear]. A guest had a horrible experience, and the place costs 100 grand a week in New York.

Hey, CXChronicles, a community of people who do this [expletive] every day and have to think about what you're going to do to remediate, or who's culpable, all these things I never cared about. That's not why I got into this stuff. I always thought it would be super cool to poll 25 people and see how they'd resolve this thing.

In the world of healthcare, it's totally different because of the compliance and rigidity of that space. Or some of our banking or fintech friends, there's so much compliance. Let's ask 50 fintech directors, or healthcare directors. That was one of the initial ideas when I was thinking about CXChronicles.

You CEOs and top-of-the-cap-table people—and by the way, that's us, guys. I'm saying that today because it's been 20, 22 years of [expletive] really hard work and not stopping. Also learning from these people to see what I needed or wanted to do, to go where I wanted to go, to do what I wanted to do.

This is another one for our listeners to chalk up to differentiation. One of the beautiful things I hear formulating in this episode, and it's always a pleasure rapping with you, is having your little list, your top three, your top five. I don't like to go past top fives. Differentiating qualities through these next thousand days, I could argue, are going to be what makes you or breaks you.

It doesn't have to mean starting your company. Maybe you're a leader in a company. Maybe you're an executive leader, or an extended leadership team member, and you think in the next year or two you're going to be an executive leader. Start to think about that stuff and owning some of the differentiation and your piece of the camp. Those are going to be tomorrow's leaders, the people businesses need to be thinking that way. That's a whole different school of thought.

Bryan McAnulty:

I agree. We're moving into a space where how you do things is pretty much everything. It's one of your greatest assets. I want to have a quick lightning round. We've got a couple questions here, looking for a 10-second answer for these next few.

What is one thing founders think customers care about, but they actually don't?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Price. Founders think way too much about price. They start thinking about good, better, best. Until you start making regular sales and understanding what's going on with stuff, good, better, best. Play around with prices. Price.

Bryan McAnulty:

That's a great answer. Focus on the value, right? Make sure the value is clear.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

All day long. Are you an expert? Are you going to provide value? Are you going to deliver enough value on a monthly basis that they want to keep paying you?

Bryan McAnulty:

Yep. What should every founder listen for when customers complain?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

I'm a bad guy to ask because I've been doing this my whole career. It's the good, the bad, the ugly. My executive report-outs have always been the good, the bad, the ugly. You do it in a [expletive] sandwich for a reason. If you only report on good, people sniff that out right away. If you only report on bad, that shit's not great. People can't dwell on negative. You've got to be thinking positive, practically, and about moving forward.

CX is weird because in life, Bryan, I live my life with, rip the rearview mirror off, throw it in the back seat, look ahead. CX is weird because up until very recently, we had to be looking back. Now there's way more forward signaling on the road, if you're driving down the highway, which is going to get interesting. There's still going to be backward stuff, we know that.

I would say understanding the primary or paramount items of good, bad, and ugly, and showing them together so it's normalized, so you're not only displaying positive or negative.

Bryan McAnulty:

I like that. On the show, I like to have every guest ask a question to the audience. If you could ask our audience anything, whether something you're curious about or just want to get people thinking about, what would that be?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

It's funny. You literally told me this would happen. The brilliant question I thought I had at the beginning, now we've talked about so many things. Where my brain is now is: what are you going to do to ensure you survive the next thousand days?

I'm not trying to be an alarmist. That's not what I'm doing at all. But I hope everyone can see, and I'm sure in the next couple months we'll finally start to see some initial actual indications that validate this stuff. What are you going to do in the next thousand days?

For me, I'm like Rick Grimes, brother. Between working my butt off, learning more than I've ever learned before about this stuff on the side, and continuing to get more of these conversations with awesome people like you.

Then my side hustle, Bryan and I were talking before the show, I'm a musician. I'm getting back to things that, for now, AI can't touch. Somebody might say, oh, Adrian, Suno. Suno's terrible for people who can actually write songs, play songs, play instruments. Sure, we can use it. Bryan, what I told you about the originals I'm working on, that's an easy way a guy like me or you could take a hundred songs and make them a thousand songs. It's a lever. It's not creating.

If anything, I've seen really cool stories about executive record producers on the hunt for songwriters. Now's also a time, guys, it's okay to own your craft. If you've got something outside of business you're [expletive] good at, own the [expletive] out of it, especially if it's human.

The more human we can all be as we move into this next camp, because we're not at Terminator yet, guys. The more human we can be over these next thousand days, I think that sets you up for where you should be placed then. I don't know about you, but I want to be in the 20% that's still rocking and rolling in a thousand days.

Bryan McAnulty:

Yeah, definitely. Very well said. Adrian, it was great having you on. Before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Bryan, number one, this is awesome, brother. Thank you. I'm super appreciative of you having me on. Thank you so much for coming on the CXChronicles Podcast.

Guys, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Adrian Brady-Cesana. Check out our website at cxchronicles.com. The easiest way to learn about some of the stuff we're doing, go to Apple or Spotify right now, follow CXChronicles. It'll bring you into our whole ether.

We've built this community of almost 15,000 customer-focused business leaders from across the world. The angle's been simple. We're learning from almost 300 incredible founders, executives, and leaders who had to go through this stuff on their own in different areas, spaces, times, and places. It's the easiest way you can jump into CXChronicles and start to get ahead in terms of some of the stuff you want to learn.

Bryan McAnulty:

Awesome. Thanks, Adrian.

Adrian Brady-Cesana:

Thanks, Bryan.

Bryan McAnulty:

I'd like to take a moment to invite you to join our free community of over 5,000 creators at creatorclimb.com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, check out the Heights Platform YouTube channel every Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. U.S. Central. To get notified when new episodes release, join our newsletter at thecreatorsadventure.com. Until then, keep learning, and I'll see you in the next episode.