’s Philadelphia office, inscribed so long ago that the ink can no longer be erased from the board. That’s exactly how co-founder and CEO 

 regards the company tenet: It’s inextricable from a startup that’s laser-focused on relentlessly delivering outcomes.

Of course, Guru isn’t the only startup that claims to be “results-driven” or “obsessed” when it comes to its customers. But Nucci takes this concept and kicks it into high gear. He and his team at Guru, which develops internal knowledge-sharing platforms for teams, are determined to build a product that proves its value to users.

As a seasoned veteran of the enterprise SaaS space (Nucci’s previous startup, 

, was acquired by Dell in 2010), he’s seen too many startups fold from an inability to prove their value-add to customers. “One thing I kept hearing from founders of legacy products that had shuttered was some variant of, ‘We couldn’t justify our existence, so people stopped buying,’” says Nucci. 

“The ability to demonstrate value to customers can determine whether a startup

 — or fades into irrelevance with the next tide.”

Consequently, Guru’s approach to proving customer outcomes is meticulously quantified, rigorously unambiguous, and integrated into every facet of the company. From defining the market and designing the product, to communicating success metrics to customers and employees alike, Guru has been built on the goal of mastering the art of the outcome. “For us, ‘success’ means being able to tell a customer that Guru’s resulted in a 20% reduction in handle time and a 34% reduction in repeat questions for their sales team,” says Nucci.

In this exclusive interview, Nucci shares how a doggedly results-oriented ethos shaped Guru’s strategy from Day 1. He lends founders a page from his playbook for mastering the art of the outcome, sketching out the steps he takes to prove value to each client from the first conversation and sharing the strategies he uses to cultivate an outcome-oriented culture across all teams.

THE OUTCOME-ORIENTED COMPANY AIMS NARROW AND BUILDS WIDE

When founders build products they’re proud of, it’s only natural to want to share it with the largest audience possible. But leading with questions like “How do I spin up sales?” and “How do I scale fast?” can set founders on a perilous course.

“It’s tempting to want to expand your territory right off the bat, then tack on customer success as a secondary priority,” says Nucci. “But remember that how well you prove yourself to customers ultimately determines how long you stay in the game.”

In a recurring-revenue world, every year is an opportunity for a customer to question whether your service is actually adding value. The answer to that question better be yes — or your ship might sink faster than you can correct your course.

According to Nucci, the seeds of customer success should be planted early, before even finding product/market fit. For companies in the early stages of company-building, here’s how to make customer obsession a true, load-bearing pillar, rather than a decorative talking point.

“A lot of startups get attached to this quixotic goal of growing fast and selling a product to every vertical, to every business in the world,” he says. “But what most founders don’t anticipate is that you run into more problems the wider you cast your net.”

That’s a lesson that Nucci learned the hard way with his first startup. “At Boomi, a big part of our product was building ‘connectors’ for cloud integration. In the first year, we wanted to build for everyone; we didn’t focus on a set of use cases for specific personas, like 

,” he says. “Because we didn’t focus on understanding each persona, it made it hard to know which KPIs to focus on and master. We eventually resolved that rookie mistake, but we would’ve been a lot more impactful with more focus from the get-go.”

When Nucci moved into the productivity space with Guru, he found the category full of pain points and pitfalls that, to a young company, might look like a lucrative market. “You have to remember that every company in the world has a knowledge problem; no matter what size you are, it’s just different variances of pain. But the wider you try to build, the more bland and generic your ROI story is going to be,” he says. “

You could create a kick-ass product, but if you try to build wide too early, you’re never going to be focused enough to solve any one problem in a significant way.

 If you try to sell to everyone, you’re setting yourself up to disappoint someone. Instead, start with the most granular target market. Make sure you can solve 

When you’re building a product, don’t try to solve all the problems in the world. Focus on solving the most important problems extremely well.

Narrowing the market isn’t only helpful for 

 — it also helps companies stay focused on generating outcomes. “When Guru launched, we had designed a product for sales teams. We pinpointed the metrics that would help sales teams operate more efficiently and, ultimately, win more deals. For about 18 months, we didn’t do anything else,” he says.

That said, even if the outcome-oriented company starts with a narrow target, that doesn’t mean the market has to 

 small. While Guru started out concentrating on selling to enterprise sales teams, they spotted an opportunity to expand: Sales teams were introducing Guru to their colleagues in customer service. “We were scratching our heads at first. It wasn’t an application of the product that we'd initially anticipated,” says Nucci. “But after we dug in, we realized that customer success teams were experiencing analogous pain points.”

The team knew, though, that if they wanted to keep Guru’s gaze trained on the outcome, it wouldn’t be enough to coast on organic market expansion. “We could have applied the very same playbook and gone out to get a foot in the door with all of the support teams of our existing customers, or aggressively marketed to this newly discovered segment to win net new customers. But that would have lowered the bar,” Nucci says.

So Nucci’s team went straight to the source and, again, aimed small: They set up a conversation with the team’s manager to ask them to describe their pain points, in their own words. “If you’re trying to sell the same product to the dev team, the HR team and the sales team, the language you’re going to use is going to be very vanilla,” he says. “

You can’t simply map problems from one vertical to another and expect your product to satisfy both of verticals equally. Even within the same company, each team defines impact differently.”

In other words, Guru proved outcomes in smaller subsets before expanding and layering on new use cases over time, thoughtfully and intentionally.

One-size-fits-all products seldom prove their worth. If you want to demonstrate value, drill down into customer outcomes. Make each individual persona feel like their problems are heard and understood.

Building an excellent customer success team

 seems like a counterintuitive first play, especially if a startup hasn’t garnered a robust customer base yet. “Typically, founders figure out the sales motion and then start hiring SDRs and AEs to execute. There’s a lot of 

"Most young companies will hold off on investing in a customer success manager before they reach a certain annual recurring revenue. You’ll see founders working off of ratios, such as having one CSM for every one to two million in ARR, all while they’re furiously expanding the sales team,” he says. “If you want to stay outcome-oriented, that’s a huge mistake.”

In Nucci’s view, this approach overlooks a simple truth: When the contract is signed, your work is just beginning. “Dedicating a team to customer success lets you optimize for customer outcomes 

 “If you neglect customer success, you’re setting yourself up to battle fires as they start, and potentially losing customers along the way. You don’t need me to tell you that’s not a great outcome.”

Customer success isn’t an afterthought or a nice-to-have — it’s a must-have.

That’s why Guru built out its customer success team 

 it hired any sales representatives. “We brought on 

 as employee number five, and she was solely dedicated to developing the customer success team and thinking about customer outcomes,” he says. For that period of time, Nucci and his co-founder still shouldered the brunt of the sales work and didn’t hire their first sales rep until a year after they invested in customer success.

At first blush, investing in customer success over sales seems unwise, because it’s not a scalable approach. “Sometimes, 

give yourself permission to try things that don’t seem remotely scalable

,” says Nucci. “If we hadn’t dared to sacrifice scale, we wouldn’t have gained that invaluable understanding of what makes our customers successful and how we can iterate toward that. As we’ve grown, that ratio has evened out to a more typical proportion of one CSM to every two to three sales reps.”

Staying outcome-oriented isn’t just about starting small and setting early customers up for success — it’s also about making sure that you can tap into the product experience to back up that success.

In Guru’s case, that meant paying close attention to how the customer was using the product, and using those insights to inform the back-end architecture. “We might have easily gone the way of becoming a separate ‘destination’ for companies, which is a model that we often see in enterprise SaaS,” he says. “Instead, we intentionally designed Guru to be as embedded into users’ workflows as possible. That way, we could more precisely track how customers were using our product, 

 we could use those insights from product integration to prove our outcomes.”

For example, Nucci’s team can track how a customer uses Guru when it’s integrated with applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack and web browsers. “Let’s say a customer support agent has a ticket open in Zendesk. She’s working on it, and she gets asked a question she doesn’t know the answer to. She uses Guru’s browser extension, references the relevant knowledge in Guru and successfully closes the ticket,” says Nucci. “On Guru’s back-end, we can connect the dots so that we know, specifically, what knowledge was used to address that ticket and where Guru fit into that equation.”

Because the workflow integration is built directly into the back-end of the product, Nucci and his team get front-row seats to their customers’ pain points and successes. “This way, the line between their improved metric and Guru is really clearly drawn. They don’t make any changes to their support operations other than introducing Guru. Then, they measure a metric — say, the time it takes to close a ticket — again. Did Guru help move the needle?” says Nucci. “Because of the integration, the customer has a more seamless workflow, and we get an immediate feedback loop. It’s a win-win.”

Success shouldn’t be generic. Success is the ability to prove to the customer that x metric gets improved by y percentage, because of your product.

THE PLAYBOOK FOR MASTERING THE ART OF THE OUTCOME

With a target market, a customer-focused team and a tailored product in place early on, Nucci’s next task was to translate that diligent attention to customer success into a scalable, outcome-oriented sales motion. He quarterbacked what he calls the 

: the conversation framework that helps Guru lead with outcomes, throughout every step of the sales process.

“You can be the best in the world at winning deals because you can convince leads that you’ll solve their problem. But it’s your follow-through that will determine whether that customer decides to renew,” says Nucci. “That decision hinges on whether you’ve delivered on the promise of the sale — on whether you can 

 you’ve solved their problem. And you can’t do that unless you’ve been talking about outcomes from the very first sales conversation.”

Are you paying attention to the metrics that matter to your clients’ success? If you spend more time talking about lagging indicators like ARR — rather than metrics like DAU or feature-specific engagement — stop saying you're customer-oriented. You're sales-oriented.

Here, Nucci shares his step-by-step guide for making a product’s value-add the focal point of the conversation.

1. Define a focused, tangible language for success.

Too many sales conversations about what success looks like happen too late or linger in the realm of the superficial, setting the deal up for a rocky road to renewal. To stay focused on the outcome, initiate the conversation about success earlier on, pushing the dialogue further and moving it further up the funnel.

“Before the customer becomes a customer, we ask them: 

What does success mean to you? What’s important to your business?

” says Nucci. During that conversation, the sales reps try to push prospects to nail down specifics. “Usually, they’ll start with something general, like, ‘We want Guru so that our support team can reference it.’ That’s wonderful, but you have to keep pressing. You can’t anchor success in that, you can’t set up a proof point there that will make renewal a slam dunk.” he says. Nucci recommends following up with another question: 

Could you articulate how the business will run better with this particular product?

“What we’re going after is an answer that’s more like, ‘We want Guru because it would let our support team reference information more easily and faster. Because the support team is finding answers faster, their average handle time will go down, and they can take more calls,’” says Nucci. “If they say can articulate that specific problem and solution, and tie it to what Guru can do, we’d say, ‘That’s great! Let’s get to work.’”

As a potential client opens up about their definition of success, listen to the language they use. “We’re so comfortable with our own jargon, our own sales and marketing language. When you’re trying to maximize your customers’ outcomes, step into 

 perspective,” says Nucci. “Listen for the words they use to describe their business goals and outcomes. What a sales persona would refer to as ‘knowledge,’ a marketer would call ‘content.’ Draw the link between your persona’s language and your product.”

Listen carefully to the words your customers use to describe success. Every customer has their own lexicon. Language is a powerful window into what they value — and how you can deliver.

Tuning into a company’s language can also give you a clue as to whether the company is a good fit for your product in the first place. “When the customer describes their problem, they should be able to explain why they think that your technology could play a role in the solution,” Nucci says. “Sometimes there just isn’t a good fit for a technological solution, whether that’s because their existing infrastructure is too complex, or because the particular problem is better solved by human interaction.”

In these cases, don’t be afraid to turn down a deal. “When someone tells you they want to use your product, it can be tempting to get them to sign on the dotted line ASAP,” he says. “But you’ve got to pause. Do they really understand how your product will add value? Do you have a clear agreement on what success looks like? If you don’t, you’re not ready to do a deal. In fact, that’s not a deal you want.”

Meanwhile, Guru’s sales team is already communicating new clients’ goals and language for success to the customer success team. “

If sales and customer success are having this conversation early on, the handoff is seamless.

 Both teams are aware of each client’s needs and the outcomes they want to achieve, with nothing lost in translation,” he says.

Once the company’s language for success is pinned down, the next step is staking out measuring posts. “Pick specific metrics where you know your product can help,” says Nucci. “It’s not blue ocean. It’s a matter of prioritization.”

One tactic Guru uses to help customers gain clarity on metrics is the pre-sales survey: “We supplement trials with a survey that essentially lets the customer ‘diagnose’ and get a sense of the scale of their own knowledge problem,” says Nucci. On one occasion, a customer was generally aware that they had a knowledge problem; when the customer completed the survey, they found that their GTM teams needed to go to 

 to access knowledge. “Everyone was shocked. 

If a customer sees their own problems and values quantified, rather than a generalized data set, it makes the sell a lot more compelling

3. Establish the one or two metrics that matter most.

“At that point, the client and the sales rep would document those metrics, and then propose something like, ‘Guru can decrease handle time by 15 percent,’” says Nucci. “Your conversation about customer outcomes should end with a goal that’s meaningful to the customer.”

To prove customer success, drill down into the metrics. “We differentiate our metrics by persona. So for our customers who are sales teams, we’ll prioritize average deal size or length to close; for support teams, we’ll measure handle time and CSAT,” says Nucci. “Broad success metrics don’t demonstrate value. Hone in on your personas, and get specific about the indicators that are most compelling to them.”

Once key metrics have been benchmarked and monitored over three months, they share that performance data with the customer success manager. The CSM is then armed with carefully culled insights into how Guru is being used and, more importantly, how well the product is stacking up to those three-month goals.

“If at the end of the three months, the goal hasn’t been achieved, we go through a list of diagnostics with the customer. We ask them questions like: Is knowledge architected in Guru the way that it should be? Which teams have adopted Guru and are using it well? Which teams haven’t?” he says. “

 the customer accountable to maximizing outcomes and impact.

 We don’t readily give up, either. We go through that entire diagnosis, then schedule another time to follow up.”

STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING OUTCOME-OBSESSED TEAMS

While a company’s sales and customer success teams are on the front lines of customer outcomes, Nucci’s quick to point out that to be truly outcome-oriented, the mission needs to be adopted by every player in a company. “Don’t talk about ‘customer-facing’ or ‘non-customer-facing’ roles. 

Every team should know that their work contributes to the customer’s success. Every team should strive to master the art of the outcome

Here, Nucci shares his strategies for rallying a culture of outcome obsession across functions at Guru.

Shine the limelight on outcome-boosting performers.

Each of Guru’s monthly town halls reserves stage time for featuring 

. “At each meeting, we recognize these advocates who 

“We want to make sure that their stories are recognized in front of everyone in the company. At a recent meeting, we highlighted 

, a customer success manager. His account asked him a simple question. Instead of answering the question and leaving it at that, he ended up probing deeper and spending an extra two hours with the client,” says Nucci. “As a result of that conversation, Alan and his account were able to formulate a stronger, more directed action plan.”

“We have two Slack channels that we ask everyone in the company to commit to reading: #Wins and #CS-Wins,” says Nucci.

The channels serve as before-and-after pictures of customers: In #Wins, the sales team shares extended write-ups for the whole company to read on how the deal was won, including a comprehensive description of the client’s business problem and pain points. #CS-Wins is the glowing “after” photo. Posts here thoroughly outline successful outcomes and which tactics the sales team used to achieve them. “If #Wins tells the story of why they came to us, then #CS-Wins is about seeing those hopes and dreams realized,” says Nucci. “It’s about closing the loop.”

The practice of celebrating wins isn’t unique. Each company and team has a different way of ringing in a satisfied customer or a milestone reached. Guru’s particular approach to these channels, however, goes deeper — and is outcome-oriented by design.

“Each win announcement is written by the AE who landed the deal or the CSM who led the rollout, and they’re about five or six paragraphs long. They explicitly sketch out the line between the customer’s problem, what we did to solve them, and how it benefited the customer,” says Nucci.

Here are a few examples of how Guru celebrates its #Wins and #CS-Wins:

The thoroughness is purposeful. “It’d be very easy for us to dash out a post that reads ‘New customer. Had a knowledge management problem. Needed a modern wiki.’ Not only would that lead to crickets in the Slack channel, but that approach doesn’t help our designers, engineers, marketers and PMs deeply understand the problems our customers are facing,” says Nucci.

“Detailed win announcements prompted our design team to dig in and get much closer to the daily workflow of the sales persona. From reading a specific win statement, their interest would be piqued by some unexpected problem, and they’d dig more deeply into it,” says Nucci. “We call that level of detail 

 — studying each persona like as though you were building a specialized product for every customer.”

Successful customer outcomes don’t materialize out of thin air. They’re direct consequences of concrete actions from our side of the table. That means that everyone, from marketers to back-end engineers, should know that they play a part in making real people’s lives better.

While celebrating advocates and success stories help to inspire an outcome-oriented culture, companies can also take their commitment a step forward by concretizing customer outcomes into team structure.

Nucci describes how his team tailored Guru’s design team around personas. “About 80 percent of the product works for all use cases. But we’ve learned that the additional 20 percent needs to be tailored for individual personas, with different integrations and analytics,” he says. “To that end, we don’t have a generic ‘designer’ role. We have designers dedicated to designing our product for sales reps, designers who are entirely focused on customer service agents.”

Guru’s design team is structured for adaptability. “If we develop a new persona around engineers, for example, we’d create a separate team of designers who would investigate and solve for the way their particular problem manifests. Because it will be nothing like how the sales rep or the customer service rep experience a knowledge problem,” he says.

When an entire company is committed to customer success, ideas for improving on customer outcomes come from a diversity of departments. “Our engineering team brought up the idea of implementing an interface in the product that can help customers visualize their own wins, to showcase the impact that Guru’s having on them, in real-time,” says Nucci. “They took the initiative to productize the conversations that we’re having in the office all the time, and open it up to our customers.”

As a result of the outcome-oriented culture, every team takes ownership over a customer’s success. “Our marketing department took the initiative to deliver six video and 12 written customer case studies that clearly communicate customers’ key value metrics,” he says.

“Even the people team can draw a connection to customer success. There’s a reason why Southwest Airlines was known for being the best customer service in the industry. It’s because their employees were the happiest of all the airlines in the industry. It’s a little more attenuated than the objective a CSM could point to, but that makes a difference in mastering the art of the outcome too, right?”

 isn’t just static ink on a whiteboard. On the contrary, if a startup is truly outcome-oriented, the principle permeates every aspect of the business, and every practice. What the customer sees, when their gains are presented to them in data and figures, is only the tip of the iceberg.

To help your startup master the art of the outcome, keep your eye on the problems you can solve, and solve them well. Narrow your target market to a size where you can meaningfully address customers’ pain points, and methodically expand your reach from there. With every customer, define a specialized language and metrics for success, then follow up religiously. Finally, structure your company culture in such a way that every team knows that they, too, have a stake in the customer’s success.

“Whether it’s how we organize our teams, or shape conversations with our customers, or share company updates, the 

 mindset touches every corner of the company,” says Nucci. “As a result of this, the product itself starts to look very different.”

That’s the promise of the future of outcome-oriented startups: changing the future of product development itself. “Historically, the productivity category of software has relied on tools of generic success. And I’m sure it’s the same for plenty of other categories, where the product takes precedence and customer success is more of an afterthought. 

For startups, being rigorously outcome-oriented is a tremendous opportunity to differentiate yourself in a competitive market

“Collectively, the next generation of startups will produce a sea-change of these excellent, exceedingly thoughtful tools, products and services,” he says. “And as both a founder and a user in many capacities, that’s the most exciting possibility.”

GettyImages-889538990.jpg

At Guru, customer success is at the center of every aspect of company-building, from product design to sales strategy. Co-founder and CEO Rick Nucci shows how a relentless dedication to outcomes gives startups a competitive edge.

Mastering the Art of the Outcome: How Guru Turned Customer Success Into a Company Cornerstone

Imagine an online shopping experience where you aren’t left to sift through thousands of products on your own, but rather are personally guided by an incredibly thoughtful customer service rep who anticipates your every need. She connects with you in an unbelievably authentic way, forging a real connection and leaving such a strong impression that years later, she’s on the invite list — for your wedding.

, an online outdoor gear and clothing company, this intensely personal and relationship-driven experience isn’t a fantasy, but rather a hallmark of their approach to serving customers and building the business.

 (the affectionate moniker for their reps) have been invited to their customers’ weddings. They also regularly meet up with their customers in real life to go on rides, ski trips or climbs out in the wild. Some high-level executives have flown out to Backcountry’s Park City office just to meet their Gearhead in person. In one case, a group of Backcountry customers got together to surprise their Gearhead with a Telluride ski trip planned solely in her honor.

In the age of one-click shipping, automated chatbots and long holds on customer support phone lines, these deep ties and offline connections are impressive. And much of the credit for the Gearhead program goes to 

, Backcountry’s VP of Sales and Customer Service.

Purkey first set foot in a contact center at the age of 17, after landing a job working the phones for 

. Although he didn’t know it at the time, this launched a nearly two decades long career centered around connecting with customers in speciality retail. After moving up the ladder to run contact centers that grew from 120 to over 700 reps, he went on to head up training, development and online sales for the music retailer before joining Backcountry.

In that time, Purkey witnessed a veritable sea change in the retail world, from the fall of mail-order catalogs to the rise of digital giants such as Amazon. Against this backdrop of shifting industry winds and increasingly impersonal internet transactions, he’s managed to carve out a differentiated and highly personal customer service experience that helps Backcountry stand out in the crowd.

In this exclusive interview, Purkey digs deeper into the philosophy behind the Gearhead model, walking through the training, tools and indicators that add up to an approach that strongly resonates with their customers. He details the steps startups need to take in order to provide high-level concierge service in an incredibly human way, offering a different path to success for those unable to match the scale of the more established competition.

THE GEARHEAD WAY: THE JOURNEY TO BEATING SCALE WITH SPECIALITY

While Gearheads were important threads woven into Backcountry’s fabric right from the start, the program has morphed significantly under Purkey’s direction.

The Gearhead label stems from Backcountry’s early days, when the founders started selling avalanche gear out of their garage in 1996 and hired fellow gear enthusiasts to help out. Since then, Gearheads have always been all-around experts in the products Backcountry sells; some are former pro-athletes or even Olympians, but all are passionate about getting outdoors, whether it’s hitting the trails in Utah’s national parks or skiing a hundred plus days a year.

But before Purkey joined Backcountry five years ago, the Gearhead program was not much different than any other customer service department. With a team that peaked around 200 people during busy season, reps simply reacted to incoming phone calls and chats, handling nearly 600,000 customer contacts a year and making up about 13% of the company’s revenue.

Thanks to Purkey’s efforts, Backcountry has since blended service and selling by pivoting to a model of proactively building meaningful connections — and it’s paid off. The team is now 500 strong at its busiest and is on track to contribute to roughly 30% of the company’s revenue after handling north of 

with each Gearhead managing up to 4,000 dedicated customer relationships

But what sparked this evolution to a more proactive and personal approach? As Purkey tells it, it’s a story that’s not unfamiliar to Silicon Valley startups: a small, scrappy and mission-oriented operation struggling to beat out a behemoth.

“Whether you’re just starting out or you’re established but really niche, competing with some of these giants is a daunting and scary notion,” says Purkey. “In my world of retail, it’s Amazon. They’re just eating everybody's shorts right now. They win by reinvesting all of their excess capital and leveraging tremendous scale to have low costs, low prices and massive selection, which is just unbeatable. So we couldn’t compete in that way — to win and fulfill our mission of connecting people with their passions, we had to build a completely different experience.”

For Backcountry, that meant revisiting some fundamental principles.

“In the early 2000s, many online retailers, us included, had this hypothesis that if they could create a flawless and convenient shopping experience, then they would barely need to talk to customers at all. But for us, that’s proven to be a faulty premise. At Backcountry we saw this gap: brick and mortar was outdated, inconvenient and transactional, but shopping online fell down too,” says Purkey. “The impersonal and overwhelming experience of wading through thousands of products leads to a paralysis of choice. The takeaway for us was that in today’s age, convenience and speed are table stakes. 

What customers really crave is a human connection and a personalized experience

 — that’s where there’s plenty of room to shine,” he says.

“We already knew that our repeat customers used Gearheads to shop, but the catalyst was realizing that we're uniquely capable of offering interactions driven by personal passions in a way that places like Amazon are not. When you put together a complete pack for a multi-week backcountry trek, it’s an emotional and complicated purchase. So expert guidance and curation from advocates with similar passions is our secret weapon,” Purkey says.

You’re not going to beat a company like Amazon at their own game. Beat down your own path to win via speciality and authentic service, not scale.

“Whether it’s through brand storytelling, discovery-driven buying, or personalized, white glove service, there are plenty of ways to uplevel the customer experience. The next step for us was figuring out how to leverage the Gearhead’s unique expertise and translate that both online and offline. Our executive team knew that there was something more to be figured out and it was my job to go out and do it,” he says.

As Purkey looked to retool and expand the program, he honed in on the idea of forging unparalleled one-to-one relationships between Gearheads and customers on a larger scale. Startups looking to replicate his approach should rely on these core pillars:

 “We have a heavily customized CRM tool so Gearheads are able to proactively identify and manage thousands of customer relationships over time,” says Purkey. “Those relationships can start in lots of different places, from a courtesy phone call on a first-time order to meeting at an industry event to connecting with people out on the trail. However you can imagine it, start developing relationships and seek out any opportunity to spark a connection with a customer.”

 Gearheads serve as advocates to not only support their customers’ needs, but to anticipate them. “They’ll leave you a voicemail to find out how those shoes worked out. They’ll proactively give you gift recommendations because they remember that it's your significant other's birthday next month. A Gearhead will even just check in to see how your recovery after knee surgery is going,” says Purkey. “Look for authentic touchpoints to follow-up, add value and have a meaningful engagement, not just make a sale.”

 Gearheads don’t get invited to their customers weddings by merely providing adequate levels of service or proactively reaching out. “Gearheads have hand-delivered orders to customers to make sure they get it on time. One Gearhead sent her very own helmet to a customer who broke hers while out climbing. Sometimes we've had to go find the inventory that a customer needs elsewhere — 

I’ve taken out my own credit card to buy a pair of pants on a competitor’s site before because we were out

,” says Purkey. “The long-term value of enabling our customers to get outside and pursue their goal or enjoy their trip is the most important thing. If we fail at that, then we’ve failed them as a business.”

There's no such thing as no. Do whatever it takes to fulfill the customer's experience.

For Purkey, these principles represent a significant investment in brand, experiences and relationships to draw people in to participate in Backcountry’s space — and he’s seeing the results.

“The outdoor market is not growing at a significant rate — if anything, it's shrinking somewhat — but our share of our customers’ wallets is continually growing at pretty tremendous rates,” he says. “And we’re online retailers, not manufacturers or vendors, but hundreds of thousands of people across the country have our goat logo sticker on their vehicle or plastered on their boards and helmets. One customer even got it 

 on his back. I don’t really see that same passion for those bigger companies. I think it’s because we're creating an expectation that otherwise didn't exist. People truly want advocacy. They want to be heard and looked after,” Purkey says.

No one’s going to get Amazon’s logo tattooed on their back. Lead with relationships and you’ll be amazed at how your customers reward you for surpassing expectations that didn’t even exist.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS: THE BLUEPRINT FOR BUILDING AN INCREDIBLY PERSONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE PROGRAM

To dive deeper into how the Gearhead program was overhauled, Purkey shares four strategies that helped reshape Backcountry’s customer experience: building a pilot program, refining hiring and onboarding practices, developing robust in-house training and customizing the tools behind the scenes.

1) Start small and experiment with tactics to build your own playbook.

Of course, this approach wasn’t an overnight success. For Purkey, laying the groundwork and establishing a solid footing was critical.

“During my first year at Backcountry, all I did was implement best practices. We onboarded a workforce management software, implemented variable scheduling and introduced a new contact center platform to get more efficient,” he says. “With that in place, in year two I was given the keys to build a pilot program to improve the model. When you’re just starting, you won’t know what the workflow looks like or what customers to engage with, so experimenting with a small group is really helpful.”

Through trial and error, Gearheads spent months iterating to uncover the tactics that resonated with customers. “We started with 10 Gearheads, Google docs, spreadsheets and a list of 250,000 customers, with a goal of figuring out how to build relationships with them,” says Purkey.

From that initial pilot program, he and his team developed a set of guiding principles that have formed the backbone of the Gearhead approach ever since:

. “We found that when Gearheads shared their passion for getting outside with every customer, it really worked. We call this ‘spreading the stoke,’” says Purkey. “Share in your customers’ emotional energy and literally get excited with them through tone, language and intent.”

 “When speaking with customers, the Gearheads who asked questions that uncovered ambitions, needs and aspirations were more successful. It could be getting to the root of why they need new hiking shoes or figuring out what their dream summit is,” he says. “Focus not just on selling them something, but rather on bringing their goals to life.”

Offer trusted and contextualized guidance

. “During the pilot, the Gearheads that shared their experiences, offering advice and connecting people to products, drove a higher customer spend. It’s essentially about making the complex simple. A Gearhead is going to recommend the 

 tent you need based on the terrain, weather, your experience and the number of people you're going with, all while leaving you out of the weeds,” says Purkey. “That guidance can take the form of a product review, a blog post, or a chat or phone conversation with a customer; whatever the medium, it’s about infusing your expertise in a relatable, straightforward manner.”

. “Our customers are either new to an activity and don’t know what they don't know, or they’re in a rush and may not remember everything. For the group of friends planning a glacier ski trip, the Gearhead takes the time to evaluate their pack list and make sure they didn’t forget that extra toe piece for their bindings or a pair of camp booties to keep their feet warm when their boots are drying. A lack of thoroughness and advocacy can make or break these moments,” says Purkey. “To take the customer's experience from good to great, you need to make sure you're recommending the right products. 

The bottom line is that sales reps shouldn’t be cash registers.

 Dig deeper to understand the customer’s intent to ensure they get 

 “We quickly found that cold-calling customers without a unique reason for talking to them didn’t work. We had to lead with relationships and find out how to be valuable to the customer in a really human way,” says Purkey. “If a customer is training for an ultra, the Gearhead will check in a week before to see how they are feeling about their race or even afterwards on how they did. Or it might be just sending words of encouragement ahead of a big job interview or calling to say happy birthday,” he says. “Extend your definition of customer outreach to support ‘life moments,’ whether they relate to your business or not. It’s about discovering the right reasons to continue conversations.”

. Bring your value proposition to life by showing your customers what you can do for them. “For us, this means ‘Don't talk about it. Be about it.’ Being active yourself and actually going the distance for your customers instead of just talking about how the company values them is what matters. That’s what’s going to drive repeat purchases or word-of-mouth recommendations,” he says.

Don’t lead with sales or an agenda. Lead with what will help you build an authentic connection to the customer.

2) Put passions and customers at the center of hiring and onboarding.

After solidifying the tactics that would make the Backcountry customer experience sing, Purkey set out to replicate the pilot program’s initial successes by stepping up hiring and fine-tuning training.

Backcountry flexes up and down the Gearhead program throughout the year, but it never compromises on the quality of its hires.

“We'll hire, roughly, 200 additional Gearheads through the months of October to March to meet our seasonal demands. Over the years, we’ve found that our ideal candidate is conversational, organized, enthusiastic, empathetic and above all, passionate about the outdoors,” says Purkey. “We actually baked that last one into our requirements — Gearheads 

need to be experts in two of the categories of gear we sell, ideally in summer and winter

 to balance out the seasonality of our business. To create a truly differentiated experience, you can’t have just anyone selling your products and serving your customers.”

Here are a handful of interview questions Purkey relies on to sniff out the characteristics that make a good Gearhead:

•What categories that we sell are you most knowledgeable about?

•What was the last great service experience you received and what made it great? What about the last one you provided?

•Tell me about a time when a customer tested your patience and how you reacted to it and turned that situation around.

•What was the last trip or adventure you went on? What should I know if I were to go on the same trip?

•What is your favorite piece of gear? Why? (They should be able to articulate the benefits and features of that product, as well as use scenarios)

•How have you handled customer price objections in the past?

Once hired, Gearheads go through a three-week onboarding process with a dedicated theme for every week:

 “The first week is very systems-oriented. We're training them on our order management system, teaching them how to do returns and getting them going on our CRM tool because there’s a lot of customizations to learn,” he says.

 “The next week is centered around teaching Gearheads how to strategically build and service a customer base. It’s focused on soft skills, communications and relationship building rather than pure sales tactics,” says Purkey.

 “The final week of onboarding is what we call a ‘nesting environment.’ The new Gearheads are live and taking customer interactions, but they have a dedicated team of trainers who are there to support them and guide them through those conversations. After that, they’re effectively are handed off to their sales manager.”

Be as thoughtful and rigorous when hiring your customer service and sales reps as you are when you’re hiring engineers.

3) Go deep with in-house — and ongoing — training.

But Gearhead training doesn’t stop after the third week because Backcountry has taken the unique approach of putting together a full-time, in-house training and development team.

“As we grew, we realized we had to create the training ourselves because it didn’t exist off-the-shelf. So we hired a head of training and now there’s a team of dedicated trainers who are focused on different functions. Over the years, different cohorts of Gearheads have experienced drastically different forms of training content as our team experimented to build a playbook that works,” says Purkey.

“We made a lot of mistakes along the way. At one point, we shifted our entire training focus to selling and selling alone, really trying to create a pure sales organization and nothing else. It contributed to a slew of problems and regrettable customer interactions. Using our training team to create a hardcore sales environment didn’t work out well,” he says. “

We're still a sales org, of course, but from a training perspective, we spend a lot more time on empathy and collaboration with customers, rather than just teaching people how to be truly effective salespeople

“For example, our team developed a training session on identifying the customers who might resonate most with the Gearhead relationship. Some still prefer to be self-served instead. So it’s about getting better at quickly identifying those people and not trying to serve them with something that they don't want,” says Purkey.

Here are three additional Backcountry training practices that stand out:

 “Onboarding a learning management system (LMS) has been one of the best investments we've made in the training,” says Purkey. “We spend a lot of time thinking through how we balance digital learning with hands-on interactive support. Every quarter, we release a new series of modules that are focused on products, systems, process or policies for Gearheads to spend time on.”

As a gear company, it's important that our employees have access to that gear. So we built a gear closet, a 4,000-square-foot retail-like space that’s fully stocked with the latest equipment. Gearheads can go touch, feel and try on products. They can also actually check them out for use in the field for up to two weeks at a time,” says Purkey. “When they come back from using it, they've got an intimate knowledge of the gear, and they're able to translate that back to their customers in a much more meaningful way. They also write reviews or take photos and videos of them using the product, so it’s doubling as a bigger content strategy,” he says. “

You don’t need physical products to adopt this approach either. Get creative.

 You could send your reps to shadow customers or sit with the engineers building the product. It’s about bringing another dimension to the sales and customer service toolkit.”

 “We give every Gearhead one hour of education a week. We also frequently pull the team together to do weekly sessions or workshops, either getting them up to speed on new tactics or refreshing skills,” says Purkey. “For example, a recent workshop was on value prop. It focused on how to communicate the Gearhead value prop to a customer and how to demonstrate it over the first 30 to 60 days, with the objective that, every customer that you connect with knows what you can bring to the table. We'd been testing different processes and structured approaches and put together the best practices to share with the group.”

4) Get the right tools, building them if you have to.

Another cog that powers Backcountry’s personal customer experience is their heavily customized CRM tool.

“There was no off-the-shelf tool that did exactly what we needed. We chose 

If you're hoping to get better at talking to customers:

Mastering the Art of the Outcome: How Guru Turned Customer Success Into a Company Cornerstone

How Backcountry’s Support Reps Go the Extra Mile — And Get Invited to Their Customers’ Weddings

Start Up on the Right Foot — Build a Customer Advisory Board

Your Users Deserve Better — An Inside Look at Remind’s Customer Obsession

'Get in the Van' and Other Tips for Getting Meaningful Customer Feedback

How to Engage Your Users to Build the Product They Actually Want

This Is How You Get People to Trust Your Product

Eventbrite's Playbook for Building Amazing Customer Service from Scratch