The Future of CS Is the Trusted Advisor — Aidan Murphy

It's like a lot of these jobs are now looking for customer success guys that can do the account management, the account executive stuff, like you said, but it's also driving activation and growth.

It's really evolving into that. It's not just like you're sitting at your inbox waiting for an issue.

Today's guest is Aidan Murphy. He's the enterprise customer success manager at Slope, an AI native B2B lending platform backed by JP Morgan, with partnerships at Amazon and Walmart.

Before Slope, Aidan was at Ramp, building relationships with CFOs and finance leaders at some of the fastest growing companies in the country.

Before that, he was at Zoe Financial, matching people to financial advisors entirely over the phone. And even before that, he was at Fidelity Investments, where he was the first face clients saw when they walked through the door.

Every single step in his career has one thing in common: the stakes of trust are unusually high. You're not selling software.

You're asking someone to trust you with their money, their business, and potentially their financial future.

So we talked about what it takes to build that kind of trust, especially over the phone with someone you've never met.

We talked about why he believes the secret weapon in enterprise customer success is still simply picking up the phone.

We looked at how Slope is leveraging AI agents across their customer success motion, and why they waited probably longer than they had to, to put those in front of customers.

And we ended up somewhere I didn't expect.

We talk about what the next generation of customer success actually looks like, and why the people building it have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

This is episode one of "Scaling Trust." I'm your host, Matt Tidwell.

Let's get into it.

All right, Aidan, welcome. Welcome to the show. Great to have you.

Yeah. Thanks, Matt. I really appreciate it.

Been looking forward to this all week, so...

Yeah. Likewise, man. Well, I got to say, as we started this journey of putting these conversations together, I saw your profile on LinkedIn, and I started checking out more and more of what you were doing.

In a past life, I had a side hustle on Amazon, selling products on Amazon wholesale and doing things like that.

I got into just seeing what you were doing, then you were posting about AI support.

You were posting about all these really cool things, and I was like, "We need to see the magic behind what you have going on." So could be more pumped for today. So maybe for context, just to share with the audience a little bit, would you mind giving us the 10,000 foot view of your career? You've spent a lot of time in what I would say, from technology land, have been kind of like high trust environments, where people really have to believe in the person they're talking to, and they really have to believe in the technology behind it.

So I'd love for you to just give us context on your career history, and then we'll jump into some topics.

Yeah. Of course. I started my career back in 2023 after graduating. I moved up to New York and joined Fidelity, who I'd worked with the summer before as well, working in one of their offices in the Upper East Side.

Kind of dealing with any clients that came into the office.

Helping them with anything from account management things, adding more funds to the account, depositing, anything like that.

Really loved my time at Fidelity, but had a great opportunity to move more into the account executive, account management roles where I joined Zoe Financial, which was a little bit more financial consulting. We were helping people find financial advisors.

These were either people looking for an advisor for the first time, or had unfortunately come into some money after an unfortunate situation. Someone ended up passing money down to them.

Or a kid like me, 24, 25 years old, who was doing really well in his career and had a large amount of money that they had no idea what to do with, had never seen that money in their life. Or their parents hadn't either. So really needed someone to guide them.

And that was done all over the phone, which was kind of crazy to me, is like they could obviously meet the advisors in person if they were in an area or the advisor was willing to travel.

But the first communication with us was all done over the phone or email. After that, I moved over to Ramp.

Everyone's kind of heard of Ramp at this point, I think.

Kind of the big beast in corporate card, expense management, bill pay, everything. Helping accountants close books.

There, I was helping CFOs, heads of accounting, kind of anything, get a look at the Ramp platform and really how we could help them. I then moved over to Slope, where I'm currently at. I started under software sales, trying to reach out to banks, getting a look at what we're doing on the underwriting side.

I then moved over to lending, where I now manage all of our enterprise clients at a large scale. These are businesses on some of the partnerships we've announced, Amazon, Walmart, and some others as well, where businesses come to us and they're looking for some funding to keep that business growing. Or it's like their peak season and it's high revenue time for them, and they need a little bit of extra funds to grab more inventory. Or even businesses that have a chance to lock down some discounted rates from a vendor and they need those funds on hand whenever they can.

So we really offer a kind of flexible approach to lending.

Yeah. That's amazing. And I guess you kind of implied it, but I guess the main customer base that you're dealing with are usually like e-commerce style businesses in that way?

Yeah. Definitely e-commerce, CPG, consumer goods, those sorts of companies. We've started to break into healthcare a little bit as well.

We really try to have a diverse book.

We kind of started with one of our vendors with like ticket resellers, and shoe resellers as well, which people don't think as an in-- It's an interesting industry to get into, but we really have a pretty diversified book over here.

That's amazing. I'm thinking about that, and we're going to touch on some of the enterprise stuff, but you mentioned something when we first met, and you shared a highlight of it in your bio there just for a second, and the idea of connecting to financial advisors you've never met, trusting them with your new West Coast engineering salary, trying to figure out investments and things like that, or other circumstances.

How were you able to navigate that with the folks on the phone? How were you able to build rapport so quickly and/or establish trust and/or matchmaking between that client and the advisor themselves? How did you go about doing that?

That is either a lost skill or it's an art or it's a science, something there. I'm curious. Tell me more.

Yeah. No, it was definitely interesting because when I first started, they got me on the phone pretty early, like my first day, to get my first meeting booked, which was a really cool thing that Zoe did.

They try to get you involved pretty early.

It's not like a super long onboarding process.

But luckily, my financial skills translated well from Fidelity. I would say the biggest thing was we really took our time with it on the phone.

You're getting to know the person.

You're not kind of jumping in, "Hey, where are these funds?

How much do you have?" That sort of thing.

You're kind of taking it slow, trying to learn really what's the reason they came to you.

They filled out a form online, so that's kind of where we start, to be like, "Hey, what kind of brought you to this point?" I would say the other biggest thing is I really believed in the product.

These were financial advisors I would've trusted with my own money.

A lot of the people at Zoe used some of their own as well, and that was a great thing, is we all truly believed in the product.

And with these advisors, they went through a pretty long vetting process before they're even on the network. They had to interview with members of the team. They had to have a certain amount of experience.

They had to have a certain amount of qualifications, if that was a CFP, a CFA, something like that.

So they really had to have these qualifications, and then in interviews with the team as well. So that's what I truly believed in, is these advisors were some of the best of the best.

If you just go on your LinkedIn page, you'll see the kind of the trajectory of your career thus far, and you have been playing in some of the biggest fintech markets that exist. You've moved from some of the largest companies to the largest companies.

Is that intentional?

Clearly, you're doing some really amazing things at Slope current state.

So is this fintech journey that you're on, has that been intentional? Is that something that you maybe just fell into? There are a lot of guys who are just on the phone to meet a quota and a commission, and you're just trying to instill and build team and culture and trying to do those things. But I've been on the receiving end of those phone calls, and you can tell a difference as a customer when someone actually does truly think that what they have in market is the best solution, and they're just trying to help you make the right best decision for you. And so I've been on good calls and bad calls.

I would say bad calls, just customer perspective.

But you've made some pretty big leaps in the largest fintech companies in the space.

How has your belief in product shaped those journeys?

How have you selected these paths? How have these opportunities happened for you?

Yeah. To be honest, it wasn't ever kind of...

As a kid, as I said, I think in our pre-call interviews, I thought I was going to be a marine biologist coming out in my junior year of high school. And then realized it would've been really cool, but it wasn't going to be something long-term that I really thought I could get into.

Yeah.

So coming into college, I came in undeclared.

I wasn't sure, like, hey, what did I want to do?

I realized from my past experiences, I worked at a golf course.

My first job ever was a bartender down here in Atlanta.

So I realized the one part I did like was speaking to people, talking to people, getting to know them.

And so someone raised it, like, "Hey, why don't you take a look at marketing or sales, finance, econ, something like that, so stick in business." So after kind of a year, I was like, you know what?

I think marketing with a focus in sales is probably going to be the best route for me, and so that's the route I took.

And then obviously, I ended up in finance.

So it was kind of interesting, the career path.

I interned at Fidelity, really liked what Fidelity had.

They're a large company, but wanted to feel like I was contributing a little more.

And so that's why I joined Zoe. They were a team of 20 or maybe even less than that, split between two offices.

So took on the role at Zoe, and that's when I started to feel like, hey, this startup kind of thing is what I really like.

It's like I have a chance not to just do what they told me my job is.

I have a chance to jump in on other things in the company.

And then the opportunity at Ramp presented itself.

I had a couple friends there already.

They were like, "You've at least got to take a look.

You've got to do a first-round interview.

I'll even refer you to them." Cool.

And then stuck with Ramp, and then didn't see myself really leaving, but the opportunity at Slope presented itself, a little bit smaller of a team. Ramp had already grown to over 1,000 employees when I had joined. Opportunity at Slope presented itself.

Again, joined a team of like 25, but I would be really getting to control what I did, how I kind of ran my day-to-day and everything like that.

And obviously, it's beenGreat for me. I can't say anything bad.

I've really got to work my way up from partnerships to customer success, now to managing enterprise clients, to still working in partnerships.

So at no point was any of this planned.

Probably two years into my career, I started to realize startups, fintech, that's what I seem to be pretty good at, so I started to stick on that route. But at no point was any of this really planned.

You're like, "I'm just along for the ride like everybody else." Yes.

Exactly.

Well, you have a unique quality about you.

I realized this when we first met, and we did a pre-interview together.

You have kind of this gift, even on a virtual call, of making people feel comfortable, welcomed, that sort of skill set.

Your person-to-person communication style is really approachable, and I think in this AI world, you are at a company that has lots of AI involved in all different aspects of the business, and then I saw the other week, even bringing some of that stuff into customer success motions, account management motions, and support.

But you seem to be very big on the human-led aspect of it.

I'd love to just dig into that a little bit with you, because I feel like there's this balance that we all have to strike in business of how much efficiency and automation and tech touch, or whatever people call it, whatever season we have. But you've been really, really successful in getting on phones, shaking hands, meeting people, and then just a really human-led approach, and I'm really curious, can you just share a little bit more on your dynamic in that, how you're thinking about growing the business in that way, and maybe some things that you do?

Yeah. Of course.

Growing up, I wasn't the most social kid, but we moved around a ton as a kid, and so you're always the new kid at a school, so you're having to go out there and make friends, almost pitch yourself to a new group of kids every couple years.

And that's where that came from, is kind of being able to talk to anyone, because I was pitching myself as a 12-year-old kid to another group of 12-year-olds being like, "Hey, let's all be friends." But I think the biggest thing is getting on the phones, being able to meet with these people in person.

Not every customer is the same. Not everyone needs that.

But a lot of customers like that, especially stuff you're doing over email, obviously offering to hop on a Google Meet with them, or if you can't do the in-person, if I have a client in Washington, I'm not planning to be out there anytime soon, and they're not going to be in Atlanta, Georgia, anytime soon. There's that disconnect.

But being able to just offer to hop on a Google Meet with them, it makes them feel comfortable because you're always-- At least they can put a name and a face to who they're talking to.

Yeah.

In addition to that, there's questions that they can always be answered. You're like, "Oh, I wonder why they're not using the product," or, "Is there something wrong?" So it's like just being able to get on the phone with some of them, and you're like, "Hey, my name's Aidan.

I'm one of the enterprise managers over here. Just wanted to check in.

I saw you got approved recently. How can I help?

Is there any questions you have?" Sometimes they'll be like, "Hey, yeah, the reason I hadn't used anything is I had some questions about this." And maybe they hadn't responded to the email. They were waiting for something on our end.

And so it's always good to just give them a call, shoot them over an email, do something where it's just like, "Hey, I'm here for you.

You let me know if you need my help or if you're totally good," and I'm happy either way. I have customers that was like, "Appreciate you reaching out.

I'm fine. I can do this." And I'm like, "Great." And there's also the customers like, "Hey, I'd love to hop on a phone call. Do you have some time today?

I'd love to kind of go through it, and I'm happy to walk through live and do a demo." Yeah.

I think those are important, so it's like sometimes you don't know what the customer is thinking, and so that's why you actually need to give them a call.

I have a couple customers in Atlanta that I've offered to go out to the offices.

I'm like, "Hey, been using Line. We've kind of established a relationship here.

Personally, I would love to come out and kind of see the offices, see what you guys are building over here, see how I can help, and kind of incorporate Slope into that." Yeah.

The first question I always ask when I get on the phone, so if I hadn't spoken to them before, is, "Tell me a little bit about your business." And it's because I truly do care. It's like, how did you guys start building this?

And a lot of them, that opens them up because they've been doing this for 15, 20 years. This is their life.

A lot of these guys left high-paying corporate jobs to start these businesses, and it's like, all right, well, why?

It's like you kind of left safety to try something new, and they've been building it over the last 15 to 20 years, and so it's really cool to kind of hear their perspective on everything, how they built this business, how they chose that product that they're selling.

Mm-hmm.

So that's always a really cool conversation that I always end up having, usually the first time I end up speaking to the customer.

Yeah. How are you getting these signals? What are the types of signals that you're looking for as you think about retention, adoption, brand loyalty, things like that?

Yeah, of course. The biggest things is one of them I kind of look at last year. I've obviously only been at Slope almost 10 months at this point, so there's some clients we've had for years, for five or six years that-I don't have, have never had a conversation with. And so kind of being able to dig back and be like, "All right, they spent in April of last year." Because they haven't spent in April of this year, they actually spent in most Aprils of the last couple years. That's a pretty good signal to me, and it's like, hey, maybe it's just a check-in here.

And you're like, "Hey, I realize you've kind of been spending in April.

That seems to be a bigger time for you. What can we do to help out?

Do you see a time to use Slope coming up?" That's a big signal as well.

Mm-hmm.

Obviously, if they've been approved for a while, we kind of have a thing, it's like last 30-day approvals or something like that. Whereas they haven't used it, maybe haven't responded to a couple emails, or in the worst case, it's like for some reason we missed the approval, and it's like, oh, that's on us.

We need to jump in here and be like, and check in, and give them a call immediately, and then apologize and say, "I'm sorry we haven't reached out." That's luckily a very rare case when that does happen. We've got a great team over here on the customer success and lending side. So that's made my job a lot easier as well.

Yeah.

And then I also track myself, just new approvals within each month. So if someone's approved, I've been talking to them, I have a list that I've created.

Mm-hmm.

Each month, the list has last month's new approvals on people that didn't use it, and then it starts tracking this month's new approvals as well. I go through that list every week.

If I've reached out to them that week, I'm not following up again.

I don't want to be too much. Or maybe I send an email, it's like, I'm going to give him a call this week just to check in, make sure they've got my email or something like that.

Yeah. For sure.

How is AI playing a role in this process?

I would imagine, obviously, you're the enterprise customer success manager currently and working on those accounts.

Do you have different processes? Does technology play more or less of a role at different tiers of customer for you? How are you thinking about that?

Yeah. AI is involved in every, it doesn't matter the size of the client, which is good. I prefer that.

It doesn't matter if you're a 500K business that just started or you're a large client in the 50 million-plus range. It's like you still have access to everything at Slope, which is how I believe it should be.

Mm-hmm.

If your payments are, if you're a larger client and you need more features, you have access to everything at Slope.

Sure.

Which is great to see. I think the biggest thing that agents has come in, as we said in our pre-call, we had built AI agents internally. And so everyone on the team uses them.

They're fantastic. The biggest use for me, as a customer success manager is, as I said, there are clients that have been here longer than I have, and I don't have any background on their relationship with Slope.

I can actually put in the name of the company.

I can put in the customer ID. I can do that, and it will give me a full rundown of all of their past- Mm ... conversations with Slope, which is super helpful for me.

At the end of it, it will give me a little summary being like, this is kind of the hot points, what you should talk about if you want to reach out to them. It's fantastic.

And that's the biggest use for me is these are clients that have never met me, never spoke to me, and I have no background on them yet.

So that's how I use a lot of the AI agents myself.

How do you think that that plays into trusting you as the next, I don't want to call it the handoff, right?

But that's just the reality- Mm-hmm ... of the world of business, right?

You get handed off to- Yeah ... the next person that's taking over or whatever that happens to be.

How does that help you carry the through line there?

How is that perceived by customers?

Do you think it plays a role in not only how you show up, but then how they renew, how they expand their use of Slope and things like that?

Yeah. For the most part, I've gotten pretty positive feedback as like, "Hey, really nice to meet you. We had worked with..." I'll usually say in the email, "Hey, I know you had worked with this person on my team before.

They've either moved into a new role or they've left the company," which happens in business.

People are leaving, joining. It's what happens.

And so most of the people are like, "Oh, great.

Now it's good to know I have another point of contact here at Slope." So that's most of the perceptions of it.

I do get a couple responses be like, "Wow, that's really impressive.

I didn't know you knew that all about the relationship." And be like, "Hey, to be honest, I reached out to your manager before," or, "I have a tool that's given me a little bit of background on your stories." But still, it's not received negatively. It's like, all right, well, at least he's actually dug into our relationship. He's been here 10 months.

I've never talked to him, but at least he dug into our past relationship with Slope, and he has the background to know how he can help me.

That's cool. And you guys, if I remember correctly, y'all have been working on agents in the success side of the business for a while, and you actually delayed pushing some of that infrastructure out and making it publicly available.

What were the concerns and considerations that you and the other team, obviously you're interacting with customers, engineering's also pretty heavily involved in that. What were the concerns?

What made you kind of wait in rolling it out, even though it's like the hot new thing that everybody's got to do to be- Yeah ... sexy and investable?

Yeah, no, it makes total sense. And we've gotten a lot of super positive feedback on that because there's some customers who are just looking for a quick answer.

It's like-"Hey, how do I change an email in here?" And it's like, they know me, they have my contact information, but sometimes they don't want to bother me for small stuff like that.

And so when they're reaching out to some of our AI agents, we want it to sound still as real as possible.

And it's not to trick any, it's like we want it to sound like you're still talking to one of us. If for some reason you're like, "Hey, I don't want to bother Aidan with just this easy how do I change my email?" Or something like that.

And so that was kind of the reason we were kind of sitting on it. And we're also trying, the engineering team just did a fantastic job with building this out. It's like when it was announced, the risk team was playing around with it all day, and I was like, "Hey guys, look, I still need some answers here.

Stop playing with the AI agents." Which is great.

But it's really been a huge help for everyone.

And no AI is going to be perfect. I know ours probably is still building itself, but it's learning, too.

I know ours still is not perfect. Our engineering team has done a fantastic job on it, but we wanted to try to make it as perfect as possible. We wanted to really lessen the errors.

There's these things, confidence scores.

It's like, all right, how confident is it that it gave the right answer, that it gave it to the right person? All of that sort of stuff.

And so they wanted to have a pretty good confidence score in that, too.

Yeah.

And then when we announced it, it was just fantastic.

You're like, "Stop playing with the new toys, guys.

I have real clients that need answers and- Yeah, exactly.

...

quick answers." How is the team thinking about that?

How are you thinking about it, as far as the role of customer success within the org, in building and kind of empowering the agentic side of the business?

Are you heavily involved, or is the team heavily involved in feeding it or building the knowledge for the agents, or is it more qualitative experience feedback?

How are you involved in that process?

Yeah. Our head of operations, Jeremy, is hugely involved with that, and our engineering team. Jeremy used to be in a very similar position to mine before he kind of moved up in the company.

Cool.

And Jeremy obviously had all the background already because he had been speaking to the customers as well. So that was just a really easy transition for Jeremy to kind of move up in the company and also help train these agents because he has all the experience of, I forget how long, like a year and a half of doing this, basically. So he had all the experience and the conversations and everything. And so basically, they just pulled it from Jeremy's conversations as well as mine and others- Yeah ... to kind of help do that.

That's cool.

So it really just made it kind of an easy transition with doing it.

And the great thing is we're still hiring right now.

It's like me and Jeremy are hiring someone for an operations associate.

It's not taking over. It's more of a side-by-side thing that we all have access to use. But you still need people.

So it's like we're still hiring over here, which is great to see.

So do you think about the AI interface as quick resolution, low touch sorts of solutioning, or do you find that it's mostly routing? It's like, "Let me get you to the right human that can help you solve." You also mentioned that there's kind of this research and context for you.

How do customers experience that, and what role is AI currently playing?

I guess current state, it'll do all sorts of new stuff here in 45 minutes, but- Yeah.

... current state, what role does it play in your flow?

Yeah. So we have two sides of it. We have the AI agents that are actually talking to the customers, and then the agents that we use internally, and that's not anything to do with talking to customers. It's what we can do- Cool ... to help with credit risk decisions or summarizing cases or applications.

There's some complex multi-entity stuff out there.

It's like a business has a parent company, and then they've branched out and have a bunch of different sectors. It's like that's super helpful for me to kind of, it will map it out for me, so I can- Oh, wow ... then share that with credit and risk.

It's like, all right, this is the breakdown of the company, a org chart, basically.

You touched on something in our pre-interview. I don't want to lose that thread.

I'm going to do my best to remember everything.

You've had a lot of different roles, both from advisory and then in success and account management, different things like that.

And we kind of riffed on the idea of there is customer success within some organizations where it's primarily a reactive role. It's like support tickets, calls, resolutions.

And then we just kind of through story shared what you're doing. And I think helping customers and clients achieve the outcome, not just get one issue fixed in the day, is going to be the competitive moat for a lot of brands.

You mentioned when we were talking like, "Hey, we're one of a couple of solutions in these big enterprise marketplaces." We're one of a couple of solutions. And so I'm trying to think the human service, the human-to-human connection that you build becomes a differentiator now, I think, as more and more companies are just trying to release agents, trying to release new features.

They're able to develop, and the developers never sleep because they're bots, and all that sort of stuff, right? And so-But we said there is customer success that most big SaaS companies know, and then there's what you're building. And I think you are building what I would consider is the future of success, and you're really closely tied to the customer's outcomes in a way that is beyond support ticket, beyond resolution.

It's almost like full cycle account management plus sales plus success. It's this interesting- Yeah ... interesting mix.

How would you say that flavor of success is different?

What is different there?

And how would somebody else know what type of org they have and maybe how to pivot? Maybe most of their team is quite literally involved in Zendesk all day long, and they're supporting answering tickets and doing those sorts of things, which are still valuable to every aspect of the business, but how do they know which one they're building, and how would you define what you're building?

Yeah. I'm huge on LinkedIn. I know you are, too.

You always see job postings. You see people kind of talking about the industry, where it's going, and the customer success role has really just evolved. It's not just your typical responding to emails, sitting in Zendesk waiting for a ticket anymore.

Yeah.

It's like a lot of these jobs are now looking for customer success guys that can do the account management, the account executive stuff, like you said, but it's also driving activation and growth.

It's really evolving into that. It's not just like you're sitting at your inbox waiting for an issue.

It's like this is so much more proactive because you talk to the customer.

I have a customer that calls me half the time it's not about work.

Yeah, he's great. He remembered I was at my cousin's wedding last weekend with my girlfriend.

He remembered my girlfriend came down for Easter, and he just asked about that.

And it's like you're talking to these customers every day, and it's like when the issue already starts to come up, it's like you know.

It's so much more proactive. And again, as I said, it's not just emails and it's also activation, growth. That's what the customer success role is really evolving into.

And over the next couple months, that's what it's going to be.

It's not just going to be your email Zendesk stuff.

Yeah, man. Yeah. How do you think about creating that capability within Slope? It seems like some things are just very natural to you. It's the way that you operate.

You mentioned you're hiring an operations associate, how do you think about building that capability and that culture of that idea around proactiveness, relationship management pieces?

I would say even rapport building.

You're more of what I would consider a trusted advisor than you are customer success manager in a way.

Yeah.

A lot of these kids have that already.

So it's like a lot of the ones we were interviewing had the experience of operations and account management already.

Mm-hmm.

Which is great to see. It's like they've already started evolving kind of their LinkedIns, their kind of talk tracks and everything, which is fantastic to really see, because it's like you're kind of a multi-pronged person.

It's like at a startup in particular, I forget where I saw it, but it's like if you're just doing your job, you're doing it wrong.

And I think it's a really great way to look at it.

It's like you're at a startup with 25, 30 people.

If you're just doing your job, you're doing something wrong.

Yeah.

And Slope made it very clear to me, it's like, "Hey, you're probably going to be in this role for three months, and then you will either transition to something else or you're going to take on more responsibility, or you're going to move to another project." And that's exactly what happened in three months.

And so that was really cool to see, and that's what a lot of startups... I have friends that are interviewing currently at other companies, and a lot of people when they join a startup, most of them know what they're getting into. And most of the time, people interviewing them let them know.

It's like, "Hey, do you know what you're joining here?" Mm-hmm.

It's a much easier process. It's like you don't want a kid who's not expecting that, not expecting the little bit longer of hours. It's like we're not getting killed over here, but you're going to be working a little bit longer of hours here at a startup with 25, 50, 75 people. It's like that's a small company still.

Yeah.

So it's like that transition to startups, and again, that's where I said I thrived the most. It's not just doing my own stuff, but really taking on whatever the company needs.

And a lot of people are starting to understand that when they're getting into the startup space.

It's like, yeah, are you taking a risk of the company doing well?

100%. But it's like this also is going to be the greatest growth opportunity for my career. It's like I've learned more here in 10 months than I did in probably two and a half years.

That's amazing. That is the trade-off, though.

That is the trade-off, and you're young enough as well.

It's like you got to shoot the shot while you got it, too.

You can go along- Yeah ... for the ride and absorb what happens and keep moving, so.

Yeah. They were like, "Do you want to travel?" And I was like, "Yeah, I'm 25. Let's do it.

I'm happy to travel. I'll build up my delta miles.

Let's go." At a younger age, it's like you kind of have to take that risk.

It's not going to pay off every time, and you kind of have to understand that as well. But it's like there's a lot of cool stuff that you get to do.

It's like traveling is, I love it. Obviously moving around, it probably makes me a little more susceptible to it. It's like I was kind of ready for it.

It's what I like to do.

Yeah.

It's going to give you a lot of great opportunities, a lot of cool people to meet.

What skills did you have to learn? Where did you find yourself struggling in the transition into enterprise and things like that?

What nuance was there? What new things about this kind of enterprise seller, this enterprise marketplace world that you entered, where did you find yourself having to skill up, having to fill some gaps in that role?

I wish I could say it was the relationship management side. It really wasn't.

It was the operations more side of it, the more technical side of it.

And it's also being able to speak to the CEO of a pretty large company, a CFO of a guy who's been in the industry for 30 years.

It's like, yeah, he probably knows more than you.

So you need to know when to take a backseat as well and just listen to them. It's like you're going to learn something from them, too.

They've been in this industry. They understand it.

It's like you don't get to those positions and 30 years of experience without doing something really right. So it's like that part, too.

It's like I'm 25, I don't know everything in the world. And so it's like don't push them too hard.

I understand my product, but it's like they're probably going to understand something about the industry as well.

Yeah.

So being able to learn from them and take a backseat was an important thing for me to learn, too. It's like you don't need to go in and just tell them why you're better.

When you're going against a competitor, it's like you need to listen to them, their problems, what they're really looking for.

Like a big thing for some of them is just like, "I need someone I can call." And so my direct phone number to my mobile phone, not a work phone, not anything, is in my email for these clients. And so they can call me whenever they want. And it's like we're on a company recharge day today, and that customer success never takes a day off, really.

So I was looking at my contacts be- before this, and I probably had 1,000 or something coming out of college and in my first couple careers. And I think I'm at 3,000 now after 10 months here, which I don't mind at all. But it's like they have my direct phone number if they need it. So it's- Yeah ... really cool, they can just call me.

If they, for some reason, just want to hop on the phone, they can do it.

Yeah. You think access is a big piece to trust, differentiation, those sorts of things, in the market that you're operating in?

100%. Like anything that's related to finance, money, it's like we're not going to be perfect, but I will do my best to get on the phone with you, if I can. If I'm not in a meeting, if I'm not talking to another client already- Yeah ... I'm going to do my best to at least get on the phone with you, and if it's an issue, it's like, "Great.

Can you send me a screenshot of the issue you're seeing?

And I'm going to send it over to engineering right now, and we'll have something for you, hopefully by later today." Or it's just like, "Hey, we're kind of game planning this month of what we're going to do for inventory. Can we do five minutes?

Let's go over that." And I'm like, "Yeah, let's do it." That's good.

So it's just having access to it. I do get the occasional Saturday call. I will most likely at least answer and be like, "Hey, man.

It is my day off.

Is it like..." And it's just like, "Hey, it's just a quick question." I'm like, "All right, great. Let's knock it out right now." But if he's like, "You know what?

You're right. It's going to be a little bit longer of a thing," I'm like, "Great.

Let me go. So I'll come into my office. I'll get on my calendar.

I'll be like Monday morning, 10:00 a.m. How does that look?" He's like, "Perfect.

We'll set up time for the next week." And at least knock it out that way so it's one of the first things I'm doing on Monday morning.

Yeah, man. Yeah. That's great. I love it.

You've shared a lot here. I don't even know if I can recap it in an elegant way, but a couple of things that really stand out to me are you talked about access and rapport building and the trust-building process.

You talked about the role of AI in that.

Yeah, you do have customer-facing things, and it was essential that that felt human and natural and in the voice of the team in the customer-facing aspects. But you also mentioned that the real power of AI for you right now is actually in really quickly keeping up with all of the nuance and details in some of these complex deals, complex relationships that you all have.

I thought that was really, really sharp.

We should probably do a follow-up on how the brains are built and all that stuff.

That'd be so cool.

Yeah.

And then I love the fact that you touched on the future of customer success and growth and the move to much more proactive forward-thinking, almost like account management, sales expansion kind of mindsets.

Like how can we do more to further the relationship together versus like how can I keep you happy on this KPI chart to make sure that when renewal comes up, you're going to sign up again, or you're going to renew the line of credit with us or something like that. It feels like you're taking a much more human, relationship-first book of business approach versus like here's a list of people in my CRM that I'm tagged on, and I have to keep up with who's happy and who's not.

It's interesting because you see those AI SDRs out there.

It's funny you mention you've been on the other side.

It's like when I took over at Slope, it's like I started being on the other side of people cold calling me.

I was like mind blown. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm getting cold calls now," which was really funny to see. And I've gotten some of those AI SDR calls and nothing yet to those companies or the people that are using it, but it's like I'm going to hang up, unfortunately.And so it's like there are still those human touch points that are needed.

So, as I said, it's like we're not trying to have them be the front man for us. It's like that will always be us, me, customer success, like a person.

The AI is more just an agent that helps us out, that works alongside us. It's not here to replace anything.

And that's always really cool because on LinkedIn, again, going back to it, it's like you always see the battles back and forth about AI SDRs or just AI kind of taking over. And it's like I'm a firm believer against that.

I think it's a fantastic tool that people use to help them be better at their job, and it's definitely something I do as well.

Yeah.

But people will always need that human touch, from what I've experienced. It is back to Fidelity.

People still come into the branches.

You can do everything you probably want on Fidelity online accounts, but people still come into those offices every day.

Yeah. So true.

I love it. As we wrap the interview, again, thank you for making time today for this. This has been pretty awesome to jam with you.

Thanks for making it happen. Do you have any words of advice for somebody in a success function or building a success function?

Maybe they're in fintech, maybe they're not, but they're in technology.

What parting words of wisdom, what could you share with them as far as what's the next iteration of customer success, and then how do they equip for it?

Yeah.

As we've said before, you need people for it.

So hire some people.

I'd say the biggest things is don't just ask those typical questions when you're doing your interviews, like actually get to know the person. You want to see how they think.

They're not going to have all the right answers, but kind of dig into their background.

Not just on the interview stuff, don't go too personal, obviously, but ask a little bit of personal questions.

It's like when I was interviewing, I would bring up the story of me always moving around and having to pitch myself to new friend groups and try to make friends, and if I don't try to bring that out, it's like they'll never know that, but it's why I've been able to really take a step forward in relationship management and in customer success.

So I would say those are the biggest things.

Obviously, don't over-hire too early, but it's like you can find four or five really good guys or girls out there that can run a customer success team and function. It's like you don't need to overdo it.

It's like we have a small team of a couple people that are on the customer success side, and we're able to really cover every account.

That's great.

So those are kind of the biggest takeaways I would give.

But at the end of the day, you need someone who's not scared of the phone, who's not scared of, again, we're not perfect. I'm sure I've messed up.

And I'm sure I'm not always going to be able to give the answer that they want.

So you need someone who is comfortable being uncomfortable, I think- Mm ... is what I would say.

There's the T-shirt, man. We're going to get that made.

Exactly. Right on the T-shirts.

That's awesome. Well, Aidan, I won't commoditize any more of your Friday, man.

I hope you have an amazing weekend.

Thanks for making time to be here on "Scaling Trust." Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your wisdom, your experience with us, and, hopefully we'll have a chance to reconnect and do another one of these about the evolution, all the other cool stuff you're going to be doing here in the short term, I'm sure of it, so.

Yeah. That'd be great, Matt. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Awesome. See you, man.