The 360° Customer Journey with Carson Conant, Founder and CEO Mediafly

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talk to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We are joined by Carson Conant, the founder and CEO of Mediafly. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Carson. First, sales process versus customer journey. Second, the customer life cycle, a cross-functional reality. And third, the customer experience, moving from reactive to predictive. Carson, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Carson Conant** (1:06)
Thanks, Ray. It's great to be here. So just a quick background on me. So I'm the founder of Mediafly, and I've had the pleasure of running Mediafly for about 15 years now, and evolved through many different neat things. And we're focused on, we're a revenue enablement platform focused on bringing together revenue intelligence and sales enablement, revenue enablement capabilities into one cohesive solution. So hopefully, that did a good job of summing up real quick without being too lengthy. I look forward to talking.

**Ray Rike** (1:36)
So let's jump right into the middle of a topic that I've, you know, I know we've talked about a little bit and everybody and their go to market teams are talking about. And that is the customer journey. It's a big highfalutin word. But Carson, how do you define customer journey?

**Carson Conant** (1:52)
I would describe it as secuitous. I think it's interesting. You know, I talk more about buyer journey or seller journey because I think they're viewed in very different dimensions. So when I think of the buyer journey, which I think is probably closer to what you're talking about from the customer journey, essentially it's that company or that person's journey to choosing the solution that they want to leverage and then ultimately their relationship with that company later on. When I think of their journey there, it's very exploratory. It's kissing a lot of frogs. It's reading a lot of stuff. I think it's a totally different experience than the other side of things, which is I think the seller journey, which is kind of a long for the ride on that securitous route, which is really frustrating to a lot of folks. But ultimately, the seller is entirely trying to figure out how to make it more linear, like streamline it, get them to yes faster, rather than being a Sherpa or a friend on this crazy, crazy long buyer journey.

**Ray Rike** (2:47)
Okay. So let's break it down a little bit here, Carson. So the buyer journey, the customer journey, same thing, right? Basically. So we talked about one of the beauties of the SaaS and subscription revenue model is, you know, we can have a lower barrier, hopefully, to get them onboarded as a new customer. Then the challenge is to retain them, expand over time. Are you saying the customer journey really is more holistic and it goes beyond the initial acquisition, but it looks at that entire cycle from acquisition to retention to expansion, right?

**Carson Conant** (3:20)
Absolutely. Yes. 100% agree with that.

**Ray Rike** (3:23)
So our organization structures don't really mimic the buyer's journey. We still have marketing, then we have sales, and now we've got this great new organization investment called customer success often responsible for the retention and sometimes expansion. Do you think our go-to-market organizations from both a structure and a strategy perspective are really mimicking a customer journey?

**Carson Conant** (3:48)
Well, that's a great question. So, no, I absolutely do not think that's the case. I think it gets a little closer as the more the humans get involved in the sales process. But I think to your point, I think there's some distinct handoffs between that kind of marketing lead gen function onto the kind of more sales function. And then you're right, then it's the customer support, nurturing, account management. Just some context there. I think for the customer, I think that early phase is probably very different feeling from them. I think it's kind of like moving down that funnel, right? It's much more exploratory and much more fact-finding and talking to a lot of different companies. I would say that the customer journey where interacting with the salesperson, I think, is not that dissimilar with then interacting with the customer success and service and nurture organization. But I would say that there's a kind of an air gap there in solutions and communication and handoff between those two pieces.