226: Unlocking Success: Conversations with Barry Klein on Cultural Alignment, Recruitment, and Customer Service Delivery with Barry Klein

Barry Klein is Vice president of Success and Enablement at Austin-Based Talroo, the data driven job and hiring event advertising platform that helps businesses reach the candidates they need to build their essential workforce. Barry provides leadership to Talroo’s team of Customer Success Analysts who have both revenue and customer service responsibilities for multiple verticals. 

Passionate about establishing “customers” as “partners”, he focuses on long-term relationships, lifetime value and establishing raving fans. With more than 30 years of experience in customer-facing and executive roles, including Vice President of Sales Engineering for Vignette Corp, Barry also spent several years running his own small business and consultancy. Barry holds a BS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

 

Questions

·    We always like to hear from our guests in their own words, how did you get from where you were to where you are today?

· Can you share with our listeners a little bit about why you believe recruitment is so important as it relates to customer service delivery?

· In terms of how do we hire well and focus on cultural alignment? And I imagine this begins in the interview process. What are three main things that you believe if you’re tasked with that responsibility for an organization, where would you put your focus, maybe three top areas that you put your focus on if we’re trying to get cultural alignment?

· Now, could you share with us what’s the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?

· Could you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that you’ve read, it could be a book that you read recently, or one that you read a very long time ago, but it has had a great impact on you.

· Can you share with us also, what’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about? Either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.

·  Where can listeners find you online?

·  Before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you got derailed or there was an obstacle or hurdle that was presented to you and it caused you to not be on track but when you thought of that quote or when you recited that quote, it kind of got you back on track. Do you have one of those?

 

Highlights

Barry’s Journey 

Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words a little bit about their journey. So, I know we read your bio that gives us formally how it is that you got to where you are today, but we always like to hear from our guests in their own words, how did you get from where you were to where you are today?

  

Barry stated that he appreciates Yanique asking and thanked her for mentioning his alma mater, RPI. As he said, he was a Computer Science Major and he was in college in the late 80s. So, the world of programming was very different than it would be today. But he wrote a lot of codes, in fact, when he went to his parent’s house years after he graduated, and he saw the Dot Matrix Paper printouts of the code he had written, he was like, who wrote this, he couldn’t in a million years, he couldn’t have recreated that code.  

But by the time he graduated college, he knew that while he enjoyed coding very much, and it was why he went to get a computer science degree, he done enough. And what he became intrigued about was the intersection of the technology and people.

And his first roles out of college were not really tech support per se but sort of high-end engineering support for customers who are developing with their platform and that led him closer to customers. 

And what he found he really enjoy and what he imagines he’s best that if he has to choose his best skill is, is explaining and painting a picture about technical topics for non-technical folks, that is very gratifying. 

It’s allowed him to have experience both with frontline decision makers, frontline influencers at any given customer, as well as executive suite folks who need these pictures drawn and need that insight. And he really enjoyed that, and he especially enjoy not only doing that himself, but enabling teams to do that with best practices, all the nuance that you need when you’re in that customer facing role, whether it’s pre sales or post sales, not just what you say, but how you say it. All of those things come together to create the kinds of roles that are always dynamic, and no two days are ever the same.

  

The Importance of Recruitment as it Relates to Customer Service Delivery

Me: So, a big part of what you’re doing at your current organization is recruitment, correct? So, can you share with our listeners a little bit about why you believe recruitment is so important as it relates to customer service delivery, maybe connect the dots so that our listeners can have a good understanding of why having good recruitment techniques is critical to ensuring that you are aligned properly to get the kind of deliverables that you’re looking from as it relates to customer service.

 

Barry shared that it is an interesting intersection because the skills and mindset of customer success folks is something that would exist regardless of what the industry you happen to be in is, but in their case, because Talroo is a talent matching platform that strives to match opportunities, especially for frontline workers with having the frontline worker at the right job, in the right place, at the right time, for the right price, so that they get the happy connection between an employer who needs the talent and the person who has the talent, making that connection is very gratifying and their entire platform is aligned around that. 

And it does create an interesting mindset for them because they’re helping employers recruit and then you say, “Well, how does that affect our own recruitment? What are we looking for? What are the processes? Everything from how do we source our candidates to how do we interview them to how do we determine their cultural alignment with our organization?” 

So, all things recruitment is really near and dear to their heart. 

And the other thing that makes it fun is, what they do is at an intersection of such a huge part of the economy, he can’t read a newspaper or put on CNBC or watch a business channel, and not have them talking about the unemployment rate and the impact. So, they are really in the forefront of all of that.  

But one of the things that they’ve really been focusing on as they craft where Talroo is going is very personal to him in terms of how he recruits and who he hires and who he looks for. One of the things they’re seizing on as sort of their mission is improving the lives of both employers and candidates, one person at a time. And he loves that tagline because it captures how personal it is, it’s one person at a time.  

And he believes in a leadership role, the single most important thing that you can do is hire well, that is absolutely the single most important thing, if you hire well, most things take care of themselves, you hire well, you train well and you correct hiring problems quickly, if you’ve made a mistake, if you don’t have that proper connection, that’s always very painful, if you have to do that.  

And then really the role he believes of a leader is to create the environment in which these talented people who are motivated and intelligent, where they can succeed. So, he often says he doesn’t do any real work, the thing that he’s most proud of is creating an environment in which these folks can succeed, get the political stuff out of the way, and set them up for success. And if we found the right people who are customer success oriented, whether that service-oriented heart, they can then teach them what they need to know about their technology, their solution, but if they are the right cultural fit and the right kind of person, then they’re 80% of the way there.

 

Areas to Focus On To Achieve Cultural Alignment

Me: So, I like the fact that in your explanation just know, you spoke about cultural alignment, and I think I would love for you to go a little bit more granular as it relates to that in terms of how do we hire well and focus on cultural alignment? And I imagine this begins in the interview process. Are there some key questions that you think may need to be asked? Does it boil down to the advertisement that you put out in terms of who you’re attracting to apply in the first place? Where do you start? And maybe what are three, I would say main things that you believe if you’re tasked with that responsibility for an organization, where would you put your focus, maybe three top areas that you put your focus on if we’re trying to get cultural alignment?

  

Barry stated that it is a huge topic for them and in fact, he was just speaking with her CEO and they were thinking back on some candidates who didn’t work out, not his organization per se, but across the company. 

And in every case, when they violated in a sense their own rules, not that there are hard and fast rules, but when they looked past a lack of cultural alignment, the candidate didn’t work out. 

And they have a very formal process whereby, typically, it’s done by their HR Department as part of the interviewing cycle, where a series of questions that are available are asked, in theory, the same topics would have come up in the other interviews with you want a candidate to meet some peers, of course, he interviews them as the hiring manager, and then they meet with HR. 

And he will tend to focus on interpersonal relationships and problem solving. When you look at their values and we’ve written them down and he thinks so many companies these days happily have their pillars of their culture on their website, whether they live by them, it’s hard to say. He appreciates candidates who challenge them on those things and want to make sure that it’s real.

But they talk about things like being customer first, they talk about teamwork, they talk about accountability. He will and others, he will focus very much on the teamwork aspect of things and conflict resolution all with an eye toward, are we doing the right thing for their customer and for themselves, he can become a Johnnie one note around win-win scenarios. He has no interest in someone who is so accommodating of a customer that they might put his company at risk. 

They look for partners and they don’t say that in a glib fashion or as a soundbite, it’s true. The nature of their business is such that if they have a customer who just wants them to service them and does not want to meet them at an appropriate point, in terms of communication and keeping data flowing and sharing reality, what’s going on, if they’re not a real partner, they don’t do well with them. 

And so, he needs customer success folks who understand that, who understand how to deal with conflict, who can navigate the complexities of those interpersonal relationships. 

So, they’ll ask questions around, of course, “Give him a scenario where you and a colleague were out of alignment and in disagreement, what did you do?” And you will hope that the candidate is honest and doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear, normally you can figure out if they’re telling you what you want to hear. 

But that ultimately leads them to the single most important question in their values alignment survey when they take a candidate and they ask them to meet for half hour with their HR Department, the single most important question came out of a real life scenario with their CEO actually, where it led to the following question, “You go to a restaurant and you have your iPad on the front seat of your car, you park your car, and you don’t lock the door, when you come back, the iPad is gone. Whose fault is it?”  

And it’s a fascinating question because what they are looking for is, “It’s my fault.” 

It doesn’t mean the thief doesn’t have some accountability. 

And it doesn’t mean that the restaurant might not have a more secure parking lot.  

But in the end, you left a valuable item out in the open with an unlocked door, they didn’t even have to smash the window, they just opened the door and took your very expensive piece of equipment. How do you not think that was my fault? I live in the real world, I have to have accountability for that kind of thing. 

It leads to interesting discussions; they’ve had discussions around none of us ever want to blame a victim in the course of a crime being committed. 

And the reason he liked that scenario so much is the car wasn’t even violated. Were you a victim? Or were you just dumb? You invited someone you say, “Please rob me!” 

If he leaves his front door unlocked, okay, you blame the thief, you shouldn’t be robbed, society shouldn’t allow that to happen. But you know what, he lives in the real world, he locked his door when he leaves. 

So, those kinds of questions really matter. And that question in particular, and he will tell you, he’s very pleased, their candidates are honest, and their HR folks take very good notes, offer their own opinions. He’ll go into their ITS and read those notes. And that’s the question he’s looking for.  

Are you personally accountable for your actions? 

You can give 10% to the thief and you can give 10% to the to the restaurant, but if you’re not thinking that you’re 70% or 80% responsible for that, you might be looking for excuses as to when things don’t go your way. And they’re just too small a company too and they wear too many hats for anyone who has that opinion.

 

Me: Wow, I love that question. Thank you so much for sharing very, very good one.

 

App, Website or Tool that Barry Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Barry shared that it’s funny, he hates to have it be the technological death star of our industry that he’s dealt with since he got into technology. But really it’s their day to day tools with Microsoft, they are a Teams shop and they are finding more customers who are using Teams, of course you have Teams aficionados, and you have a lot of folks who are passionate about Slack. But they’re using Teams and informally don’t tell their IT Department they have some Slack channels going too. But that kind of real time communication with themselves because his team is fully remote. And so, their ability to stay in real time communication and in many cases in real time communication with their customers is proving ever, ever more valuable, they couldn’t live without it at this point.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Barry

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Barry shared that it’s fun to think about, currently he’s been enjoying reading history, the historian and he is a professor at Vanderbilt University, Jon Meacham is his name. He’s the kind of fellow who when he’s a guest on a news programme, and he finds him and he sees him, he’s actually glad they’re talking about it. He’s hoping there’s a way to sign up for when is Jon Meacham going to be on TV so he can go find him. He hangs on his every word and it’s the kind of guy you kind of wish he was your grandfather telling you stories about the world in the past. 

His biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have been his latest readings. And he enjoys that because, a, he enjoys the break from technology and what they do every day, get his brain around something else. But it’s the lessons from these great thinkers like a Thomas Jefferson as presented by a great thinker in the form of Jon Meacham where he finds himself reading his books with a highlighter, because it’s not just the observations, the historical observations, but his observations when he ties these topics together. So, he always finds that fascinating, especially from a leadership standpoint.  

And it’s funny, the other thing that comes to mind is, it’s again, he’s so much older than probably many of the listeners, but when he was in high school, he read a book by a gentleman named Roger Kahn, he became famous for his book, The Boys of Summer, which was about the 1950s, 40s and 50s, Brooklyn Dodgers. 

And he wrote a book called Good Enough to Dream. And it was about his ownership stake in a minor league baseball club in Utica, New York. And the opening line has stayed with him, “The first dream full of innocence and sunlight is to play the game.” which he always loved. But early in the book, he says to someone who’s associated with the team, “Are these guys any good?” And the response was, “They’re good enough to dream.” And that has always stayed with him. “Am I the best at something? Is my company the best at something?” He doesn’t know, but they’re good enough to give it a try and see where it leads them. And that’s always stayed with him.

 

What Barry is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Barry shared that within his organization, he doesn’t mind doing a commercial for the product Gainsight, which is the customer success platform. They recognized about 15 months ago as Talroo was growing both in terms of their customer base and their staff, that as a Salesforce shop and as a Microsoft shop, the needs for customer success weren’t being met, in terms of what do they need to record? What do they need to predict? Do they have a sense around who will keep their contracts going, versus who is at risk of cancelling. 

Just as a quick sidebar, Talroo, unlike a typical SaaS company does not have a long-term contract, they have to earn their customers business every month, they can cancel at will.  

And so, it creates unique challenges and a real time need to know what’s going on with each customer. And so, about 15 months ago, they embarked upon a project to implement a customer success platform. They ultimately chose Gainsight, he will say for anyone who is looking for a customer success platform, all of the players in the industry who they looked at were terrific, he doesn’t think you could go wrong. ChurnZero to Tango, others, they were all first-class organizations, and they happened to choose Gainsight and that became an immediate game changer and continues to be. 

And so, thank you for the question about what he’s focused on? Where are they growing? How are they evolving?  

When they first rolled out Gainsight, it was primarily to support their efforts to track and manage and deal with renewals and even upsells are very important for upsells with their direct customers, employers who come to them and say, “Talroo will work with you directly to please advertise our jobs out in the world.” And that’s what they really started with for the majority of their first year with the product. 

But he has other caliber of customers who his team has to look after, including advertising agencies, and including job boards who they’ve had relationships with for years, who send them their jobs to advertise. And the needs are different across those different caliber of customers, and getting Gainsight rolled out now for the other members of his team and candidly getting adoption of it.  

One of the things they’ve done very well and that he would encourage anyone thinking about any large software purchases, the people can kill a project. If any given team refuses to use Salesforce, Salesforce will fail. If any team refuses to use Gainsight, Gainsight will fail, people can win, and really torpedo a project. 

So, they’ve done a really good job of getting buy in, forming a user council, the gentleman who is Andy Trevino, who is their administrator and RCS Ops Manager, who looks after Gainsight is always open to feedback, he’s always soliciting feedback, so that they can make the solution match the way they work. He doesn’t like software solutions where they have to change their behaviour in order to accommodate the tool, he wants the tool to accommodate the workflow and the processes that they already know work. And as they roll out the usage of Gainsight to this extended team, their needs are very different than their counterparts who work with their direct customers. So, getting that right is important. 

And that accountability is incredibly important, because he no longer could afford and one of the reasons they went with Gainsight and started this whole project was when he wants to ask the very simple or get an answer to what he hopes would be a simple question of what’s going on with fill in the blank of the customer name, it shouldn’t take him 20 minutes to figure it out. 

He needs all the information in one place and they’re doing a terrific job of that with Gainsight with their direct customers, and getting members of his team who aren’t used to it and haven’t had to use it in the past, he needs to bring them along and their feedback. And he needs to make sure the product gets built out in a way that makes their lives easier, and that they see the value of it and that it’s not just busy work, it’s not just bureaucracy, it’s that they really are using the product to make their lives better and then he gets what he needs in a leadership role, their C suite gets what it needs when they have questions about what’s going on with the customer. 

Many folks may have thought of this or use this line, traditionally, it’s with Salesforce, they would say, on the sales side, if something isn’t recorded in Salesforce, it didn’t happen. That’s the source of truth and that’s where he’s going with Gainsight, if you don’t have notes and details and specifics in Gainsight, then it didn’t happen. And you don’t want to do that for bureaucratic reasons, you want to do it because it makes the organization better and your customers more successful.

 

Me: Awesome. So, Gainsight is where you have most of your head wrapped around right now and just trying to build that out.

 

Where Can We Find Barry Online

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/klein-barry/

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Barry Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Barry shared that he has two, one is more serious than the other but the other, the funny one was his high school yearbook quote, but he will say plainly, he’s not a praying or religious person by nature, but he will go back to, “Dear God, grant me the strength to change the things I can, accept those that I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  

It really gets hard to know where you need to invest your time and energy.

What should you care about?

What do you need to back off of?

What can’t you change? 

So, the wisdom to know the difference between what you can change and what you have to accept is something he thinks about a lot. 

The more fun quote is from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, in the episode in which the character Chuckles The Clown is tragically killed, because he is the master of ceremonies for a parade. And he gets run over by an elephant dressed as a peanut, which leads to a ridiculous number of jokes and things about a man dressed as a peanut killed by an elephant. But because he was a clown by nature, his quotes, and the things that he did become a big part of the show. And his (Barry) high school yearbook quote was, “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.” Moments of stress, you know what, how serious can life be? “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

  

Me: I love it. Okay, Barry, thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule and hopping on our podcast today and sharing all of these great insights as it relates to cultural alignment and recruitment, ensuring that you’re getting the right fit to ensure that you’re able to meet the deliverables and as you mentioned, just mitigating against the wrong fit and mitigating against challenges and issues that could have been prevented had the recruitment been aligned and selected properly from day one. So, I thought it was a great conversation and I just want to say, thank you so much for taking time and sharing with us today.

  

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Links

•     Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

•     American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham

•     The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

•     Good Enough to Dream by Roger Kahn

  

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