It was 2008 when Jeb Dasteel was named Chief Customer Officer at Oracle, after leadership roles in Sales, Consulting, and “Customer Programs” at the company for 10 years. “I didn’t know a single other CCO at the time,” he recalls. “Everything we did, we had to make up as we went. Trial and error. We did some smart things and some dumb things, but by and large, we were successful and learned a lot along the way.”
Jeb left Oracle in 2019 and now advises CCOs on how to refine their customer strategy. He notes that especially in the past two years, he’s impressed with the quality of modern CCOs — but CS leaders still have gaps to fill to become an established member of every executive team.
Nuffsaid co-founder, Nick Paranomos and I interviewed Jeb on how Customer Success leaders can become more influential executives. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation. (You can also read the full interview here.)
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Chris: Here’s a controversial statement that I’d love for you to react to: The CCO will never be a strategic member of the executive team unless they own a number that matters for the business.
Jeb: I agree with that in a lot of ways. I've talked to so many people who would argue that the CCO has to report to the CEO and they cannot have a quota responsibility. I tend to agree on the CCO needing to report to the CEO, but I don't think it's absolutely essential. If you are a great leader by influence you can be under the CMO, the CRO, or the head of Service delivery and still be highly effective depending on the culture of the organization. The worst thing you can do is create the perception that the CCO’s job is somehow apart from the day-to-day objectives of the rest of the company.
I disagree with the idea that CSMs cannot be responsible for renewal revenue. For many organizations, it works really well. I don't buy into the idea that CCOs should be disconnected from the business in not having some of those strains and pressures. There is a middle ground.
When I was the CCO at Oracle, I had the latitude to fail fast—to take risks that I knew were iffy, but to keep it under the radar and completely screw up and try it again. I would not have been able to do that had I had quarterly quota attainments. However, I did feel tremendous responsibility to help Sales sell. I was deeply involved with the Sales teams every single day.
Chris: So in a world where you're a head of CS, and your Sales peer is a dictator, your Product peers or Engineering peers are egotistical maniacs, your Marketing person’s head is always in the clouds, and somehow you're supposed to drive the resources of the organization, how does one level up their influence on the executive team with those peers?
Jeb: Here’s what I did. I managed by influence rather than trying to have line authority over everyone. Of course I had my own team, but the whole purpose of the team was to influence the rest of the organization, drive change, experiment and try things out and then deploy them where they best fit. But the purpose was never to own—and definitely never to be in competition with the rest of the organization
I found that the single best thing to do as a CCO was to build street cred—particularly with Sales and Engineering at Oracle. And building street cred meant getting engaged with deals. I would not have been successful at Oracle doing anything as a CCO had I not actively engaged with the Sales organization to close deals.
There shouldn’t be a CS leader anywhere in existence that doesn't spend a significant part of their day being an executive sponsor for important accounts and being very actively involved in deals and issue resolution. We have a responsibility to help drive revenue for the company.
If your job really is to run focus groups and do journey mapping, I just don't think that you'll be able to make a real impact on the business and you won't be taken seriously as a real strategic leader.
Chris: That might be the best advice I've heard in a month, which is if you want to drive influence at the executive level, help close the deals.
Jeb: Exactly. Get off your ass and get on an airplane. And I'll tell you what, this was by far the most rewarding part of my job. Even after essentially 100% of Oracle's products became available as a cloud service and we had CHROs, CMOs, and CFOs as customers, the principal person I worked with for 21 years when I was at Oracle was the customer’s CIO. If I knew 100 CIOs around the world, I always felt a responsibility to maintain those relationships, advocate for those customers, and help drive business because of those relationships.
So I made it my job to be, and I know this term dates me, the human Rolodex for the top 100 CIOs in the world. Because my job was to know them and have a relationship with them so I could call them and have a conversation. There were so many times where the rep or the strategic account manager requested that I call the CIO because they didn’t have that relationship. I would also become an executive sponsor for many of those customers.
Now, I couldn’t be an executive sponsor for every account, but I could get on airplanes four or five days a week, cover a lot of area, and be a valuable resource by putting myself in the position of doing a warm handoff and setting the relationship up for success.
I believe every CCO should operate that way. There's literally no substitute for engaging with customers.
Chris: How can a CS leader know if they’re too tactical and not strategic enough? Are there any common pitfalls that would reveal a leader is being too tactical?
Jeb: There are two dimensions here. There's tactical versus strategic and process versus results. I think you're too tactical if you're more process-oriented than you are results-oriented. And the symptom that reveals being too process-oriented is that you're not focused on the results for your own organization by focusing on your customer's results.
To me, there are two litmus tests to understand if you are an effective CS leader:
1) Whether you are actively engaged with the Sales organization to drive business.
2) Whether all the customer feedback being collected and analyzed is being actioned upon.
If it's a “no” to either of those two, if for example feedback is just fodder for interesting conversation, it’s a complete waste of time. And actually, it’s worse than a waste of time—it's counterproductive. You will be labeled as a person who does some “interesting stuff,” but never delivers any real outcomes or results.
MANAGEMENT
The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers
Here’s a list packed with tips on how to become the manager your team needs. A few of my favorite pointers include “Think of yourself as the team captain, not the head coach,” “Spot chances to send kudos up the chain,” and “Reserve time for thinking outside the box.”
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL PARTNERSHIPS
What Product Wishes Every CSM Did
Tanuj Diwan, Head of Product at Surveysensum, points out some areas CS teams can focus on to create a better partnership with Product.
CULTURE
Why It’s Difficult to Build Teams in High Growth Organizations
Here’s an article on two core challenges of scaling a team: team structure, and culture. The author reminds us to put in place some ways to reinforce culture at scale, when the “newbies” outnumber the veterans.
RELATIONSHIPS
What To Do When A Customer Wants to Cancel A Contract
Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, with this quick list of what you can and should do when a customer wants to leave. It’s difficult but “remember that by the time a customer asks for their money back—it's too late. All you can really do is make them leave as happy as possible.”
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
In her new book, Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions, Donna Weber offers a blueprint for delivering a world-class onboarding experience.
This week’s newsletter features an excerpt from the book, where Donna highlights the importance of a customer enablement content strategy for customers and gives a step-by-step plan for building out this motion at your company.
No matter how much your customers love them, your CSMs still shouldn’t be the ones delivering training. The 2020 Customer Onboarding Report reveals that most respondents are yearning for courses to lead customers to quick wins. They are desperate for self-paced content to scale onboarding and enablement for both new and existing users.
At Ace Analytics, we leveraged courses, documentation, help articles, and other customer enablement offerings to expand the reach of the onboarding program and the CSM team. We plugged the right content for the right users into the right parts of their onboarding and adoption journey through a learning management system and email campaigns. The impact: well-trained customers were more likely to renew and had higher Net Promoter Scores.
Companies that hire me also find a correlation between well-trained customers and higher adoption and renewal rates. At a company that provides software for accountants, the renewal rate for trained customers is 50 percent higher than for untrained customers. At a company that provides process automation software, trained customers are over 150 percent more likely to renew, with 50 to 70 percent higher annual contract values. While this is impressive, both companies suffer from having a small percentage of customers in the well-trained category. This drives home how important it is to scale customer enablement: You have to widen your reach. Single CSMs training an individual, or even small groups of people, to use the product won’t impact your business bottom line.
When it comes to customer enablement, there’s a huge opportunity to profit from the useful approach mastered by the professionals in Customer Education. Customer Education scales Customer Success to onboard and enable your users in four ways: with a one-to many model and with offerings that are repeatable, role-based, and hands-on.
1. One-to-many model. While Customer Success is usually a one-to-one or a one-to-few approach, effective training is designed to be a one-to-many approach. Courses are developed for repeatable delivery, provided by many instructors, and attended by multitudes of customers. Once seld-paced courses, or tech-touch, enter the picture, the reach scales exponentially, with little to no cost for each additional person enabled.
2. Repeatable content. Instead of having each CSM creating unique classes for individual customers, dedicate resources to design and develop repeatable content that enables customers along their lifecycle. A benefit of this approach is that customers receive a consistent experience, so the success of the learning is not dependent on the particular CSM assigned to them.
3. Role-based. Rather than "drinking from a fire hose" to learn the whole product at once, people take the specific courses designed for their unique roles, at the appropriate points in their customer journey. A best practice is to modularize learning and to provide just-in-time enablement.
4. Hands-on. What most CSMs call training is not actually training. A high-level product overview and demonstration as part of onboarding doesn't provide the effect it should. A more effective approach is to provide hands-on, interactive training that is specific to the work people do in your product. Interactive courses are especially important because when customers retain what they learn, they no longer lean on CSMs for training.
Customer self-sufficiency reduces the load on both Support and CSMs, allowing all teams to manage more accounts as your company grows. The more specific, interactive, and hands-on the training, the more users retain what they learn, and the less internal teams need to continue supporting customers on basic tasks and “How-to’s.”
Rather than waiting until you have a team of curriculum developers and instructors, start scaling with these simple approaches.
1. Assign a resource. Instead of directing each CSM to do their own thing to enable customers, move content development responsibilities to one or a few team members to build re-usable content. Is there someone on the team that usually jumps in to build content? If so start with them. There might be a CSM you dedicate to building content for the whole team, or assign as your first Customer Education resource. Take what they build and share it across the team.
2. Talk to CSMs. Understand where customers need help, focusing on general use cases that can be used across multiple users.
3. Talk to Support Agents. Review the top ten "how-to" cases logged and create simple training modules so customers can help themselves rather than log support tickets.
4. Talk to customers. Find out what customers need to learn and how they want to learn it.
5. Apply the 80/20 rule. When developing content, apply the Pareto Principle, or the law of the vital few. With a "less is more" approach, produce content to increase customer skills, rather than increase customer knowledge. This means you show users the main routes, or "highways," they need to reach their destination, not every possible side street.
6. Build a few basic courses. Pick a role and a use case or two that you gathered from interviewing CSMs and Support agents. Remember to specify what users need to do in your product, not just your product features.
7. Produce "cheap and cheerful" courses. Keep production values simple, especially if your product is constantly changing. Don't spend much time on high production quality unless you know your customers demand it.
8. Set up a process. Help CS and Support teams explain where and how to point customers to existing, standardized courses, so they don't have to build and provide the content themselves.
At what stage should you invest in a dedicated Customer Enablement resource? As soon as possible. Customer training and enablement are that important. If customers don’t know how to use your software, they won’t adopt it, and they won’t renew their contracts. Start simple and assign a resource to handle initial course development and delivery. Your education resources can grow as you bring in revenue. When you charge for training, which we’ll cover in the next chapter, you can invest the revenue into building the team and developing a robust training offering.
Use your Customer Success teams for what they were hired: strategic, high-value tasks, specific to each customer. Moving CSMs out of ad hoc, repeatable tutoring and coaching keeps them focused on building stellar relationships with their accounts. Building repeatable ways to onboard and enable new and existing customers means you have a greater impact with your onboarding program. Keep it simple and improve as you go. You can’t afford to wait.
As you build customer onboarding and enablement content make sure you don’t create a tangled jungle that customers have to wade through to find what they need because odds are when customers struggle to find information to use your product effectively, they won’t adopt your product, get value from it, or renew. Also, a content jungle will negatively affect your company due to the added costs by employing expensive resources to fill the gaps, duplicating content, and using overlapping tools and systems.
Avoid content jungles by coordinating your content strategy:
1. Consider forming a “content council” with representatives from every group that creates content to take inventory of customer-facing material and uncover gaps where there’s no content.
2. Rather than building every new enablement approach from scratch, curate from different teams. Curating allows you to quickly drive users to product adoption by leveraging what’s already available. When you know what needs to be conveyed to customers, then parse out who creates each deliverable and in which format. The priority is to divide and conquer, rather than replicate.
3. Build learning pathways. Show users the progression of content in context of a visual, role-based learning path, easily accessible on your website.
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Big thanks to Donna for allowing us to publish this chapter. Be sure to check out the full book here.
LEADERSHIP
Managing Up - Lessons from Scaling Teams at Credit Karma and Lyft
An excellent, clear-eyed look at what it means to effectively manage up. Some gems from the piece: “Many professionals already know that empathy is extremely important when managing down; however, they seem to forget this lesson when it comes to managing up.” And “When faced with a difficult situation, effective upward managers package the problem in a way that makes it easy for their manager to provide help.”
STRUCTURE
Do SMBs Need Customer Success? 100% If You Also Have Sales Involved
Jason Lemkin, founder of Saastr, makes the case that if your product is complex enough to have a Sales team, you need Customer Success too. Onboarding a customer with “A wiki, some self-service Q+A, and a bunch of bots” is not enough.
CAREER
10 Lessons from 10 Years in Customer Success
Brett Matthews, Customer Success Director at Salesforce, helps us level-up by condensing his experience into a list of learnings. I enjoyed reading all of his advice, and especially points #5 (“Enable Success Within Customer Success”) and #6 (“Know Where to Put Your Calories”).
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
I believe the psychology of the customer’s emotional experience is a building block for Customer Success. By definition, the “customer experience” is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your business. So the emotional experience is a lot like psychology: it’s how these interactions are translated into thoughts, feelings, and behavioral responses.
“After I began practicing Customer Success I realized that, in a way, we are the customer's psychologist.”
In life, everything is personal and driven by emotions, especially in business. So to fully understand the psychology of the emotional experience and why that understanding is a building block within Customer Success, let's start by breaking down psychology. Psychology is focused on four main goals: to describe, explain, predict, and change the behavior of others. Effective psychologists identify needs and drive confidence through transparency. The same can be said in CS: we need to describe, explain, and predict outcomes for our customers. And we need to use transparency to develop trust with customers.
To accomplish this, we need to identify the right emotion or sentiment our customers display and also understand what drives or triggers a positive emotional experience. Then we can use this information proactively in our day-to-day interactions. Effectively implementing and using these understandings is a key element of moving from reactive to proactive CS mode.
There are a few reasons why understanding a customer’s emotional experience throughout their journey is important for those practicing Customer Success.
“Effective psychologists identify needs and drive confidence through transparency. The same can be said in CS: we need to describe, explain, and predict outcomes for our customers.”
Without identifying and measuring emotions, it would be impossible to evaluate your customers as individual personas and accurately assess account health and relationships.
My team uses six pillars to set the tone of our customer relationships and as a guide for nurturing positive emotional experiences. Utilizing these elements gives us a chance to set positive experiences from scratch.
These six elements are aligned closely to basic human psychological drivers. Therefore they apply to Customer Success and wherever there are human connections and emotions involved.
In the last year, it’s been critical for my team to track and measure a customer's emotional state. After I saw Ziv Peled’s relationship coverage model, I had an “aha” moment. I realized that while we were a mature CS organization by many standards, with well-defined processes and risk assessment, we were only looking at the account level. We treated accounts as one flat unit—a vague thing while ignoring the fact that different personas behind the account should design the health of an account.
We didn’t recognize that each persona has a different perspective, experience, relationship strength, personality, and internal relationships to manage. The bottom line is that it's a subjective ecosystem that should be treated as such. And we weren’t doing that.
Armed with this insight, I knew we needed to analyze customer relationships differently by giving dedicated attention and weight to each one of the personas by implementing a relationship model. To create an accurate picture of customer health, my team of CSMs track two areas. The first is relationship strength. I have CSMs go through each of their customers and rate the relationship on a scale of four levels.
The second dimension of our relationship model is gauging sentiment. We have a simple model of three levels: positive, neutral, and negative. We test the emotion the customer feels towards our brand, product, and service on this range.
Measuring these two areas and being able to see them on a dashboard has given us a very complex and holistic way to assess the real risk of an account. Along with developing a more accurate picture of customer health, using a relationship model will build more long-term relationships where customers will serve as growth agents and ambassadors.
Equally as important, having a relationship model in place will allow you to know exactly where to put more focus and give you precious time when something goes wrong. Why? Because when you measure your relationships by persona, you are reducing your chances to be surprised.
MANAGING YOURSELF
Bad Execution vs Good Execution
Julie Zhuo, author of The Making of a Manager, simplifies what “good” and “bad” execution looks like in 10 tweets. One example: “Bad execution is picking two—time, quality, or cost. Good execution is thoughtfully choosing the scope such that things are built on time, on budget, and at a high level of quality.”
DECISION OWNERSHIP
I Want to Hire Someone My Team Said “No” to on the Debrief
“Committee-driven decisions are almost always conservative… Especially for decisions that could carry lots of downsides - like hiring the wrong person - group decision making can result in most of the ‘maybe’ cases turning into a ‘no’.” I’m a fan of Gergely Orosz’s writing, he’s always thoughtful. Here, he shares his thinking on how to manage disagreements on hiring.
FOCUS
How the Best CEOs Use ‘Thinking Time’—According to an Executive Coach
All of these points could be applied as a busy CS leader: talk to customers (“If you already have a good relationship with your customers’ executives, you can smooth the way when issues pop up with one phone call”), build your talent bench, become a thought leader.
PERSPECTIVE
How Zendesk Adapts Best Practices in Product to Customer Success
Here’s Teresa Anania’s take on measuring the impact of CS and why they focus so heavily on Time to Value
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
Wayne McCulloch just published The Seven Pillars of Customer Success. His new book outlines an adaptable framework for building a strong Customer Success organization and is packed with detailed examples of how companies have put his seven pillars to the test.
This week’s newsletter highlights an excerpt from the final chapter of his book where he shares predictions about the future of Customer Success—and makes the case for why “reporting to Sales” won’t be part of that future.
You can read the rest of his predictions and more by ordering the book here.
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The future of customer success begins with finding its rightful place in the organization: doing so will directly impact the function’s effectiveness. Correctly placing CS within your organization will unleash its full power.
Customer success (or more specifically, the owner of the customer journey) should report directly to the CEO. I notice a lot of nondigital-native companies develop customer success functions within their organizations under sales. This is a mistake; this trend prevents the CS function from fulfilling its obligation and reaching its true potential.
You tend to find CS reporting to Sales in larger, traditional companies more often than in young, modern ones (or younger companies with digital native leaders). Leaders in traditional companies are extremely experienced experts in their industries but often have little to no experience with the SaaS and cloud-based tech movements. Considering customer success is a function born of those movements, the disconnect is easy to see.
In the next 4 sections, I’ll dive into the origins of this disconnect and 1) how the pre-subscription era mindset led to the common practice of CS reporting into sales, 2) what organizational complications develop alongside this org structure, 3) the “death spiral” that can occur for both teams when CS sits under sales, and 4) the huge benefits of having customer success report to the CEO.
This trend, having CS report into Sales, isn’t happening intentionally—it’s happening as a result of a pre-subscription era mindset that simply isn’t as effective in today’s subscription-model world. In the pre-subscription era, the head of sales ruled the roost. They were the person responsible for the majority of the company’s revenue and was thus a very powerful person in the organization. Back then, all revenue was tied to sales (and a little piece from services or support functions). It didn’t matter if it was new customer acquisition, retention, or expansion. Before subscription-based business models, sales got credit for it all.
But all that started to change when the subscription economy arrived. Suddenly, customers no longer needed to pay a massive amount up front. Instead, they were asked to pay monthly. This transactional change also inspired a change in the way customers expected to see value. In the past, it would take years to implement software and drive to adoption. Today, customers expect to see value on day one. If they don’t, they will cancel their subscription and go somewhere else.
Land and expand is the motion of increasing sales. Older companies and executives try to shoehorn sales hunters into farmers missing the true value of a customer success organization. It’s not about selling more licenses (traditional sales model); it’s about exposing value and helping customers achieve their desired outcomes. This comes from CS management.
And these changes caused business leaders to have to put more emphasis on retention, which if you think back to the very first chapter of this book, was the first wave of customer success. Customer success was born to focus on retention so sales could focus on new customer acquisition.
In the first wave of CS, when the function was a baby, there were no complications in the way it was structured because no one noticed a problem. But what do you think happened when companies started to grow? What do you think happened when CS started to own more revenue than sales from retention?
It resulted in a massive complication. “I’m the head of sales or chief revenue officer. I should own all the revenue. CS should report to me.” Traditionally, sales owned all the revenue, and seeing larger revenue dollars sitting under a different department looked weird—and ruffled a few feathers. But over time, if a business is successful, expansion and retention revenue will increase proportionately faster than new business revenue. It’s just math.
Salesforce, for example, renews more than $20 billion in revenue each year, but their new customer acquisition revenue is much smaller than that. They can’t sell $20 billion in new revenue annually. Customer success has the job of retaining revenue from customers who have been using the platform for 20 years. It’s just easier to retain $20 billion in revenue than it is to newly acquire it.
So it’s also no wonder a lot of CEOs place customer success under sales. Sales has traditionally been responsible for all revenue and CS works to retain revenue, so tying the two together makes sense and can seem like the simplest org structure option. Another reason why CS commonly sits under Sales is because this practice may lessen confusion around expansion. As much as people want it to be, expansion is never black and white and it’s hard to draw a solid box around ownership of expansion.
These are the reasons why a lot of CEOs place CS under sales, but I’m here to tell you that’s all wrong! Customer success should report directly to the CEO (or at least a CCO).
I’m not alone in this thinking either. Dave Kellogg (who previously worked at Salesforce) wrote an article about this. He claims that when CS reports into sales, it’s detrimental to both teams. You want sales to focus on sales. When CS reports under sales, the sales team gets sucked into account management issues such as renewal challenges and transactional expansion conversations.
The idea seems collaborative, but it’s actually destructive. Sales is a really, really hard job, and I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to put themselves in a salesperson’s shoes. Try to sell
against your competitors and live off your commission check. Sales is hard, and you need your salespeople to focus on it without any distractions. New ARR has to be their metric of success.
Customer success suffers, too. When the function sits inside sales, it forces the CS team to be support oriented (like it was in the past) rather than growth oriented. CS exists today because the old way of doing things needed improvement. It was created to fill in the product gaps. But as you’ve seen in each of the pillars, CS has grown into a growth engine. When the CS team reports under a sales organization, they are pushed into a support role. They aren’t empowered to expand business or identify advocates.
When a CSM isn’t driving value, they are more likely to handle support issues themselves. They want to create value somewhere, so they work tirelessly, with restricted resources, until they get the job done. This creates a death spiral. On the other hand, when a CSM is responsible for expansion, they are more likely to behave in a way to help expand an account rather than retain an account.
When you build compensation plans and operational models correctly, CS will flip major expansions over to sales, and sales will flip incidents and insights back to customer success. This means CS will find sales opportunities and share them with sales, and sales will find areas of improvement and share those insights with CS. You don’t want your farmers competing with your hunters and vice versa, do you?
Another advantage of separating the two is that it creates another professional avenue for your sales professionals. Instead of closing three deals a day, they can have access to 10 to 20 customers with transactional expansion opportunities. Once they learn the ins and outs of how customers operate, they can transition back into a sales role. Keeping the teams separate creates an easy and beneficial way to rotate employees around the company.
Separating your CS and sales team creates an internal system of checks and balances. Oftentimes, salespeople are tempted to book new business they know won’t renew.
“I know you don’t have any support people and can’t afford this $200,000 product, but I’m going to help you out. I’ll sell it to you at an 80% discount.”
The salesperson is motivated by new ARR. If they need $40,000 to get to their number, they’re going to make that deal every time. They are incentivized to close new business. We’re telling them to do this.
Regardless of the lack of renewal, a smart SaaS company doesn’t want that customer’s business anyway. They will inevitably be the customer who is always in trouble and always calling support for help. These are the customers that escalate issues and create a lot of noise inside the organization. There is nothing about this situation that’s good.
Customer success is measured on gross churn and has a strong incentive to call the sales team out when they make deals like this. “This isn’t a smart deal for us. This customer isn’t going to renew, and they aren’t equipped to manage the product internally. They’re going to cost us money. We need to pass.” Separating the teams creates a natural checks-and-balances system and suddenly you’ve got two executives at the same level having a conversation about what’s best for the company, not what’s best for the individual team.
When CS and sales each report to the CEO, Sales can stay focused on new customer acquisition and CS can focus on growing customers.
INTERVIEWING
Your Customer Success Interview Blueprint
Maranda Dziekonski, SVP of CS and People at Swiftly, shares the interview plan she’s been using and refining for the past 7 years. Complete with the qualities to look for within each section of the hiring process and exercises to assess a candidate's ability to succeed at your company, it’s worth the bookmark.
CULTURE
How to Build a Customer-First Culture
Hubspot’s CCO, Yamini Rangan, defines what it really means to put the customer first. Apart from learning about the values and practices HubSpot has in place, I enjoyed reading the story about Tesla’s customer philosophy to “make them talk about you at dinner tonight.”
SCALING
The Judicious Imposition of Structure
Here’s Executive Coach Ed Batista, with a thoughtful piece on why larger companies need more structure. Plenty of examples in there worth reading, but I found his tips on “the leader’s calendar” and how that evolves at scale especially useful.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
This week we launched the first ever magazine for Customer Success. It's titled 2.0. And the inaugural issue explores how successful CS leaders elevate their role by giving customers a seat at the decision making table.
So for this week’s newsletter, we’re highlighting a section from the magazine—my Q&A with Dione Hedgpeth (Chief Customer Officer at Sumo Logic). Dione has led an incredible career: she ran Support and Services at Mercury Interactive for 10 years, building their first CSM team back in 1999 when, as Dione says, “there was no one to copy but Salesforce.” She led Customer Success at Pano Logic, Precise Software Solutions, and then Apptio before joining Sumo Logic as their Chief Customer Officer.
Dione recognizes how increasingly important Customer Success has become over her career. “20 years ago when we were doing support and services, no one really cared,” she says. “But now in SaaS, customers are the lifeblood of the company. It’s been incredible to see how this role has evolved and grown over time.”
In this interview, Dione shares how Customer Success leaders should think about designing and advocating for their organization and where she sees the function of CS headed. To read the full interview with Dione (+ interviews and advice from CS leaders at Box, GitLab, Gong, and Gainsight), grab a copy of the 2.0 magazine.
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Chris: It’s interesting, you really have been doing the equivalent of Customer Success for 20 years even if it wasn’t called that. What are some mistakes you’ve made around team structure that you’ve learned from and wouldn’t repeat?
Dione: One mistake I’ve made and have seen other people make is trying to create the org structure first. Doing this doesn’t make sense—you have to look at the product and the go-to-market motion, then break that down into all the activities needed to drive that motion. Once you have all the activities, you determine what skills are needed to drive those.
And then once you have the skills, look at how often those skills happen. Are they daily activities, or are they activities that happen once a quarter? Because then you can design a team around the core activities, and determine who will own the activities that aren’t happening as often.
We have to break down the work first so the roles and org structure become obvious. But I’ve seen people starting with the org structure and roles first—they decide they’re going to have a CSM or an AE or a CS Engineer before considering the motion and activities that truly need to be filled. It’s backward.
Chris: Can you give other leaders advice on how to advocate for Customer Success as a function within their company, and specifically when advocating for budget?
Dione: My opinion is that the data should speak for itself.
And what I mean by that is, I don’t think there’s some magic percentage of revenue that should go towards existing customers versus new ones. Some CS teams should be at 20% of revenue and some at 5% depending on the complexity of the motion and what it takes to drive the motion.
The work a CS leader needs to do when they first come in is to actually break down the activities and count the hours. The level of investment will vary based on what work needs to be done. The math is obvious to you after you’ve mapped that out. Finance people don’t care about your stories, they don’t care about your feelings or how busy your people are. They want to see a work breakdown structure and a capacity model.
So that’s always the first thing I do when I join a company: I partner with finance and partner with my team to break down the activities, then roles, we need.
I’m also a big believer in doing a journey map because you can’t break down the activities until you get cross-functional alignment on what the desired customer experience is. I’ve brought in a consultant twice now to help us run the journey mapping session with sales and product people, and people really close to the customer. We break down the activities, then we break down the hours, the skills, and the roles. We have finance work with us on the numbers, the capacity plan—and you’re done. Advocating for budget is an exercise around data.
Chris: You’ve seen this industry evolve for 20 years. How do you think the role of Customer Success leadership will evolve in the next five years?
Dione: I have so much I could say about that topic. But speaking broadly, what often frustrates me is how nascent this industry is. With Sales leaders, there’s a methodology that exists. There’s a funnel, there’s velocity in the funnel; the revenue engine is mature in Sales.
Customer Success is no different. It’s just no different. That’s why, for me, doing the journey mapping, breaking down the activities, having phases, measuring the velocity, it’s what’s needed to have a mature CS revenue and retention engine. Customer Success leaders need to be thinking about their funnel. Right now it feels like while it’s evolved a lot over the past 5 years, it’s still so new, people aren’t thinking of it like that. But I believe it’ll look different in the future.
STRATEGY
How to Drive Over 100% NRR With SMBs
Jason Lempkin highlights data from PagerDuty, Box, and Shopify to make the case for launching a second core product earlier.
CULTURE
We Need to Talk About Your Q3 Roadmap
“Your coworkers—and maybe you, too!—are at the end of their rope...and as the product roadmap chugs along, something’s gotta give. And I think it’s going to be your [timelines].” Here’s Lara Hogan with a timely message, and tips for helping teammates get the breathing room they need.
PROCESS
Managing a Customer Success Team, With Boaz Maor
Boaz Maor, CCO at talech, shares a list of principles for managing a growing CS team. Here’s one that stuck out: “early on, over invest. You simply have to make those early customers successful, even if you can’t create an ROI analysis to back up the investment. The success of growing, expanding, and scaling out depends on that early success.”
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
CS Operations is an up-and-coming role within Customer Success. If we’re to get up to speed and create CS Ops roles within our companies that are focused and effective, we ought to learn from how other teams are doing it. That’s why this week, I’ve enlisted the help of CS Ops experts to answer 15 common questions about their role, function, and more.
Note: I recently posted this question on LinkedIn. Click here to see what other CS leaders had to say.
“No matter what, even if Customer Success is sitting under Sales, CS Ops needs to sit squarely with the broader Customer Success team reporting to CS leadership. This is crucial for proximity, visibility, and awareness of the deep nuances of what's happening within the post-sale motion.” —Jeff Justice Williams, Enterprise Lead of Customer Success at Box
“CS Ops is best suited to sit with people who have very similar skillsets so they can collaborate and load-balance between different roles. So having CS Ops within the CS team allows Ops to really focus on the top needs and understand those needs in detail for the CS org.” —Seth Wylie, Head of Customer Success Operations at Gainsight
“Not necessarily intentionally, but when CS Ops reports into Sales it always seems to come secondarily to the needs of the Sales team and the Sales Ops activities. Having CS Ops report into CS and being very close to the leadership there has consistently been the best way I've seen it work.” —Beth Yehaskel, Revenue Optimization and Customer Success Architect at Winning by Design
“One of things that I've leaned on to justify CS Ops is if as a CS leader you want me to make data-driven decisions then I need someone who can help me access that data. So if you start playing that out and say, ‘Let's use data, make better decisions, reduce churn by X percent— and what does that translate to dollarwise a year from now?’ The result is usually pretty shocking. Suddenly you look at that number compared to the salary of a CS Ops person and it becomes clear that it’s totally worth the risk to get even a fraction of that.” —Beth Yehaskel, Revenue Optimization and Customer Success Architect at Winning by Design
“I like having enablement (training, marketing materials, etc.) under the CS umbrella because that role needs to know the specific tools, processes, workflows, and data that are relevant to the CS org. Having the enablement team really tightly tied into Customer Success makes sense.” —Marco Innocenti, Senior Leader of Customer Success Operations at Zoom
“This is a struggle for Ops in general. When my previous boss said he would love to get a better sense of what a performance-based bonus would look like for the CS Ops team, I didn't know where to start. When I spoke with Sales Ops and Finance, they were just sort of like, ‘Eh, we kind of do a thing.’ So I don't have a great system for that. I think that there are things you could use like MBO’s, an internal NPS, etc. But I carry a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about performance-based bonuses. I just prefer the salary approach. We've leaned towards that, but every employee at Gainsight also has a company-wide bonus that's part of their comp.” —Seth Wylie, Head of Customer Success Operations at Gainsight
“I've seen companies look for their first CS Ops hire when their CSM team matures from reactive to proactive—shifting from firefighting and triaging to proactively guiding customers along a specific path to achieve key milestones that enable value realization. CS Ops then partners with CSM leaders in designing, operationalizing, and continually evolving these proactive strategies.” —Sonam Dabholkar, Director of Customer Success Operations at Gong.io (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“It can often depend on whether your company uses a low or high-touch model and average customer value. If it is a low-touch model, a CS Ops person could be your first CS hire. That person could build customer communication automation and reporting, and then from there hire CSMs to start engaging where the opportunity warrants the investment. In a high-touch model, I think it is still wise to hire one CS Ops person from the start, but that often is not seen as the highest and best use of funds at that stage. If your company does not hire CS Ops from the start, here are a few signs you need the function:
"Scalability and bandwidth issues of frontline CSMs are both key indicators of the need to introduce repeatable and potentially automated processes. If there is a need to build or buy third-party tools to support is another flag that it is probably a good time to look at hiring a CS Ops professional." —Michael Haygood, Director of Customer Operations at Multiple Companies (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
“CS Ops spans a wide range of responsibilities, so it’s important to be purposeful about defining what your first hire will focus on and what level of depth they’ll go to in each area. Key items will typically be systems, forecasting/reporting, hiring planning, team process, special projects, and possibly enablement. Based on my experience being on and building CS Ops teams, for a first hire I would look for someone who 1) has broad CS ops experience, and has touched all the areas above 2) can act as a true partner to your CS leader - someone who will bring suggestions and make their work better 3) has worked at a company that has made it to the next major milestone your company is trying to reach and has ideally seen that transition. *Bonus points if they have experience working in CS themselves because that will give them a leg up in understanding your team and providing recommendations.” —Jackie Lusardi, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“I have prioritized analytical skills and attention to detail as key attributes for anyone being added to the CS Ops team. Refining processes and scaling customer communication requires a lot of data review and validation. Having a "good eye" and being able to perform and understand Excel lookup functions sets the foundation for clean data and an ideal automation environment.” —Karen Blue, Customer Success Operations Manager at CentralSquare Technologies (1,001-5,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
"Systems/Tools Admins: we need people who love making the tools work for our teams. Data Analytics: someone to help make data-driven decisions. Project Management: a skill that allows us to continue to drive both CS Ops and CS projects as a whole." —Robert De La O, Director of Customer Success Operations at Menlo Security Inc. (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
“First you must align to your company’s Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy and Objectives & Key Results (OKRs). You want to set the expectation that your team is a strategic partner and not a reactive support group. If you are aligned and influencing the GTM strategy, and your team is driving towards the overarching company objectives, it is easier to prioritize what work is most important and what gets moved to the backlog. Second, manage CS Ops like a product where your stakeholders and CSMs are the customer. Implementing an agile methodology will help you collect and prioritize tasks through a backlog, breakdown complex, cross-departmental projects into manageable sprints, create flexibility to address changing business needs, set a regular cadence and change management process for releasing new functionality, and establish a measurement framework to test and monitor adoption and impact.” —Renee Burrell, Senior Director of Customer Success Products & Operations at MarketStar (1,001-5,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“In our low-touch segments, CS Ops focuses on workflows and alerting, all based on health and churn analysis. In a sea of customers, our goal is to help those 1:Many CSMs prioritize their time and mitigate risk. With our high-touch segments, we help the CSMs focus on diving deeper to better understand each customer's engagement, sentiment, and usage. —Chelsea Leavitt, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“Adoption Rate, Churn Rate, NPS, and Post-Sale Revenue.” —Kate Paliakova, Director of Customer Success and Operations at Logyc Co.
“All of them! We align ourselves closely to the overall CS Org metrics of CARE - Customer Satisfaction (NPS, CSAT), Adoption (Users vs. Features), Retention, and Expansion. If we are doing our job then we can easily spot risk and trends in our healthscores and provide feedback to the teams we support on how they can better engage with customers.” —Robert De La O, Director of Customer Success Operations at Menlo Security Inc. (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
"There are three types of metrics Customer Success Operations teams should be paying attention to. The first type of metrics is the company level KPIs the Customer Success Team is responsible for impacting. Metrics such as, the Net and Gross Renewal Rate, Net Promoter Score, and/or Active Usage Rates. As a Customer Success Operations team your primary responsibility is to enable the Customer Success Team and operationalize the customer journey, and to do this effectively you need to continuously monitor the performance of the team and how your efforts are impacting those overarching metrics. The second type of metrics to pay attention to are process performance metrics. This will help you monitor the performance and impact of the business processes and systematic workflows you implement to support customer success initiatives. Is the new onboarding process reducing the customers time to value? Is the new risk playbook being adopted by the customer success managers? What are the click-through rates on automatically triggered product adoption emails and are we seeing an increase in product adoption as a result? The third type of metrics are your Customer Success Operations Team's productivity and performance metrics. This could come in the form of managing completion of quarterly objectives and key results, customer satisfaction scores from your Customer Success Management team, or agile performance metrics to monitor the quality, quantity, and velocity of work completed." —Renee Burrell, Senior Director of Customer Success Products & Operations at MarketStar (1,001-5,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“The increased efficiency of your front line CS colleagues. We should see and measure our impact internally by how we free our team’s time to engage with customers. Also, increased QBR output, consistent quality of engagement, and increased high-value activities are all interesting measures of program success.” —Michael Haygood, Director of Customer Operations at Multiple Companies (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
"We hold ourselves to the same metrics and goals that we put on the CS team. If they are hitting their retention and health goals, then we know we are doing our job as well." —Chelsea Leavitt, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
"As an Ops team, we use Salesforce, JIRA, Tray, and Zapier to manage most of our work. We also have a tool called Sonar that is helpful on the Salesforce systems side." —Chelsea Leavitt, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
"Our CS Ops team uses Gainsight. It's our one-stop-shop for most of the data that we use and the automated "Calls to Action" and tech touch communications that we set up." —Karen Blue, Customer Success Operations Manager at CentralSquare Technologies (1,001-5,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
“We have 2 (hour-long) regularly scheduled meetings with CS leadership every week. The first, at the beginning of the week, is focused on CS Ops projects and updates. This would be where we propose any new set of work or we talk about outstanding questions. This has been a helpful forum for presenting our ideas and priorities. The second is a meeting we call "CS Metrics” and is on Friday. This meeting focuses on presenting data and findings to leadership. CS Ops owns portions of this meeting, along with other CS leaders. This is a great time to highlight findings in the data and make recommendations based on those facts and observations. It is helpful to back up what you're saying with proven data.” —Chelsea Leavitt, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
"I meet with our head of CS weekly, we have CS Ops roadmap team reviews monthly, and quarterly roadmap org updates. We also have project plans and syncs as needed to get feedback, circulate questions, and get clarity." —Michael Haygood, Director of Customer Operations at Multiple Companies (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
“CS Ops should be in close sync with other operational teams in the company that sit in other functions, e.g. Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, Business Ops, Finance. Quarterly planning sessions and bi-weekly meetings with the leaders of each team facilitate ongoing alignment of priorities and sharing of key updates. Using a central project planning tool and consistent project methodology also helps these cross-functional teams seamlessly collaborate.” —Sonam Dabholkar, Director of Customer Success Operations at Gong.io (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“I think there is a realization that customer-focused teams have not had the operational support that Sales and other teams have typically had. As we start to better define CS Ops we will have more clear career paths, communities of interest, and a sharper focus on how operational excellence can drive better customer outcomes.” —Robert De La O, Director of Customer Success Operations at Menlo Security Inc. (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
"I'd like to see CS Ops expand beyond what I've been hearing lately, which is "lives under CS leadership, focuses on CSMs." We should think more broadly about the entire customer journey and make sure to be in a position to see a more holistic view of how the customer is experiencing your brand and product through various stages. This might mean staying close to those team members working pre-sale, to understand the buyer journey and carry that over to the post-sale team. It could mean diving in with your services organization and ensuring teams are coordinating their strategic approaches with clear ownership." —Chelsea Leavitt, Senior Customer Success Operations Manager at Drift (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
"I'm increasingly seeing CS leaders (VP of CS, CCO) work closely with CS Ops to not only operationalize key initiatives but also as an innovative thought partner to guide and evolve the CS strategy. I believe we'll see CS Ops involved more in this space, and will also see a clearer career path formed from CS Ops to CS executive roles." —Sonam Dabholkar, Director of Customer Success Operations at Gong.io (201-1,000 employees, 51-200 team members in CS)
“I believe there will be an increased demand for CS Ops over the next 5 years and will see overall less economic growth over the next 5 years than we saw the past 5 years. Because of this I feel many companies will orient themselves toward increasing productivity per CSM, as priority over/instead of leveraging increased headcount. This will drive the need for increased automation and increased productivity per team member. These are two of the needles CS Ops can most directly impact.” —William Buckingham, Customer Success Operations Manager at Delphix (201-1,000 employees, 6-50 team members in CS)
ADVOCATING FOR CS
What if There Were No CSMs?
Here’s Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, with an interesting angle on how to justify the need for CSMs: evaluate what would happen if you removed CSMs from the equation.
INDUSTRY
The Art and Science of Customer Experience
“What we’ve learned from [delivering delightful customer experiences] at scale is that there is an art and a science to delightful customer experience.” Yamini Rangan, CCO at Hubspot, offers her perspective on why customer experience has become more important for B2C and B2B alike, and what customers are demanding from their buying experiences today.
PROCESS
How to Design and Implement an Effective Onboarding Process
Here, Lincoln Murphy has fleshed out (in detail) 4 tactics to build out an effective onboarding strategy. He offers some back-to-the-basics reminders like defining what it means for a customer to be “onboard.”
COMMUNICATION
On Speaking up and Shutting up
“It took me a long time to realize that A) the impulse to stay quiet is a signal to speak up, and B) the impulse to say one more thing is a signal to stfu.” Here’s Ed Batista with a concise and thoughtful post on the role emotions play in how we contribute to discussions.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
Last week we hosted a panel discussion with four leaders on what they’ve learned from running CS Ops teams. The discussion featured the panelists: Jeff Justice Williams, Enterprise Lead of Customer Success at Box, Marco Innocenti, Senior Leader of Customer Success Operations at Zoom, Beth Yehaskel, Revenue Optimization and Customer Success Architect at Winning by Design, and Seth Wylie, Head of Customer Success Operations at Gainsight.
Below you’ll find a (lightly edited) excerpt from one of the highlights of the discussion, when the group each shared one tactic every CS Ops team should consider doing.
…
JEFF: I'm lucky to have seen CS Ops within two different companies in the past year. What I’ve noticed is that CS Ops tends to get hit with different trajectories of asks: the long range, heat-seeking asks from up high and the short range, incremental asks from below. The sidewinders from by blind spots. And all of those requests stack on top of a CS Ops leader’s self-defined program for the team.
Shout out to an amazing partner I've already started working with at Box, Nora Soza. She and her team manage the process of prioritization extremely well by matching and justifying requests next to business end goals.
I may be dating myself here, but the CS Ops team reminds me of the Nas song from the nineties, “I Gave You Power.” CS Ops can set you on a really solid track if you work well with them, but you don't want to underestimate or undervalue their impact. They're not there to jump when you say “jump.” That's a common misconception. So one thing that I've recognized with CS Ops is their ability to power the team’s effectiveness towards a business goal.
If you align on business goals and strategically plan with the CS Ops team, your path will be clearer. You don’t just toss ideas over and say, “Figure it out, Ops.” You won't like what comes back to you if you do and whether you admit it or now, it will be your fault when goals aren’t met.
— Jeff Justice Williams, Enterprise Lead - CS at Box
JEFF: A CS Ops team will succeed if they have solid partnerships around the org and when their tasks are aligned with high-arching business goals.
CHRIS: You shared a lot of tips there. The one I personally liked the most is tying all CS Ops requests to a business outcome to help Ops prioritize.
MARCO: I would echo almost everything Jeff said and add a focus on getting Ops to that place of streamlined prioritization of requests sooner rather than later. Whatever tool you choose to track the inputs coming into your Ops team, make sure there is a direct link to show what the expected outcomes are from the person making the request, and then design how that ties off to either your operational Customer Success or global goals.
But tactically, having that tool in place to track asks is essential to show workload and balance. You need data around the amount of requests coming in to fuel headcount planning conversations. You need to be able to show important measurable outcomes and how your team of one or two will not be able to meet those goals in a specific timeframe.
That's one that I wish we had gotten to sooner. We're there now, and it's helped to tell the story of why our team needs to grow continually.
BETH: Jeff and Marco are spot on. What's worked well for me is to have the head of CS Ops right by my side as the Customer Success leader. CS Ops can easily become a dumping ground for a bazillion different fire drill requests all the time.
But when CS and CS Ops work in tandem, we’re able to provide air cover and guidance on request prioritization. CS Ops needs to be in a position to bring all the requests they receive to the executive table and say, “Here's the top five requests we’ve identified. We can realistically do three. Which three are the most important to the business?” Then CS and CS Ops can work together to address each request.
But when CS Ops is left on its own and isn’t a part of the CS senior leadership conversation, it's drastically more difficult for them to do their jobs efficiently. They miss out on the strategic conversation that would allow them to understand their role and the business as a whole.
— Beth Yehaskel, Customer Success Architect at Winning by Design
BETH: Ops needs to be empowered to say “no” while also preserving critical relationships with other departments. They have to say “no” in a way that doesn't upset anyone, but also they can't do everything. And I certainly don't want somebody working 80 hour weeks.
CHRIS: So CS Ops is essentially the hand of the queen?
BETH: Exactly.
CHRIS: Seth, you're going to top us off. So, what are some tactical wins?—something that your team does that everyone else should consider doing.
SETH: I have one answer that's internal to CS Ops and one that is a CS Ops outward-facing responsibility.
Internally, one of the first things I did when taking over leadership of CS Ops is still one of my crowning achievements. I put my team on an actual production cadence. We use Scrum to organize all our work and requests. Given Jeff's point, with all the heat-seeking missiles and the sidewinders, it can get real chaotic, real fast, especially if other departments are going directly to CS Ops team members with asks.
Having a production system like Scrum/Agile empowers those in Ops to use a language to respond to those requests. Finally, they are able to say, “Yes, but...” or “We can help, but there's a sprint structure” and so on. It has been hugely helpful to give CS Ops a sense of clarity, calm, and purpose, which all add up to help team members to stay focused.
Within this system, we recently added a fast lane for small requests. We dedicate a few hours a week for people on the Ops team to execute on tasks outside of the sprint because we realize a CS leader shouldn't have to wait two sprints for something like a simple report to be created. This is a nice parallel structure to have within CS Ops.
There are many things I could say about outward facing tactical wins for CS Ops teams, but one area I'm really happy our CS Ops team focuses on is taking charge of use cases. My team helps CSMs share and utilize use cases with each other. We also distribute blog posts and resources internally, so CSMs have access to this information.
At Gainsight, the Ops team also helps run our 1:many model including having ownership in our admin newsletter, our executive newsletter, in-app engagements, sharing use cases with customers, and more.
LEADERSHIP
How to Manage Managers: Lessons, Challenges, and Rewards
When you’re managing managers, “the balance of providing independence and stepping in when needed is difficult to strike.” Marta Simeonova offers advice for managers who are moving to the next level.
STRATEGY
If Nothing Else — Segment Churn
Jason Lemkin, Founder of SaaStr, points out that churn “doesn’t have a universal definition....even public companies define churn differently.” But he suggests that no matter how you calculate churn, “Whatever you do, and however you do it, segment churn and track the money.”
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Between Sales and Product: Building Out Self-Serve and Customer Experience at Notion & Dropbox
This post highlights Kate Taylor, Head of Customer Experience at Notion. One of the best moments from the interview is when Kate likens customer experience to going into someone’s home — “The concept I like to talk to the team about is customers coming into our living room, sitting down and having a conversation with us — how do we make it feel that easy to talk with us? How do we make users feel at home when they open that front door and engage with us?”
COMMUNICATION
These Are The Best Email Tips You’ll Read in 2021
Here’s Devin Reed of Gong Labs with a list of research-backed email tips. Although intended for Sales, these insights are also applicable for those in CS: make emails about the recipient, keep the content short, and add a specific CTA.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
There’s an ongoing debate within Customer Success about the merit of NPS and its correlation to retention rates. So when Brain LaFaille, Global Head of Customer Success Strategic Programs at Google, listed the Do’s and Don’ts of NPS I wanted to highlight this important topic and add my thoughts. You’ll notice that our views differ slightly—Brian is more empathetic towards NPS, whereas my view is that NPS isn’t useful.
Note: The following is a short version of his list. You can read his full list here.
✅ Do: Track NPS
Tracking NPS allows you to gather valuable qualitative data about how customers feel about using your product. This qualitative data can embellish the usage (quantitative) data you’re already tracking from customers.
❌ Don’t: Use NPS for variable compensation
Goaling monetary compensation on NPS typically doesn't go over well. NPS is purely qualitative and is dependent on the respondent's mood. Goals for variable compensation should be metrics that the CSM can directly impact and control.
✅ Do: Follow-up with all NPS comments
When a customer provides your company/service with feedback, be sure to have a human touch to thank the users who felt compelled enough to share feedback. Consider having different responses based on the responder's score:
❌ Don’t: Silo NPS data
Feedback should be shared across the company.
✅ Do: Make NPS part of your broader “sentiment analysis”
NPS coupled with other qualitative data points can help you build comprehensive sentiment health. Components of sentiment include (but not be limited to):
❌ Don’t: Focus on the number. Instead, focus on the trend.
Your actual NPS score doesn't tell you much and NPS alone can be a vanity metric. What's more powerful is measuring the trend of your NPS over time across your entire customer base, as well as specific customers. Powerful ways to leverage your NPS data include asking questions like:
✅ Do: Ask other questions than the NPS question
Here are the questions I’d advocate for asking instead of the NPS question to actually understand the customer experience:
Customer Success leaders can aggregate this data and share it with other executive team members—the CPO, CRO, CMO, CFO—to influence discussions around the product roadmap, the customer profiles the company should target, the content that Marketing should be creating, and more. By relying on better data, CS leaders can get to the root cause of customer churn.
❌ Don’t: Use NPS as an indicator of whether or not an account will churn
NPS is not correlated to overall retention rates. Other factors are much better indicators of the risk that exist on your account such as:
✅ Do: Consider the value of NPS as a touchpoint
Every touchpoint with the customer is precious, so consider what value your organization receives from the NPS score (besides executive ego boosts)? How is NPS data used to improve the quality of the customer experience? Since the average NPS survey gets < 20% response rate, that means we wasted the time of the other 80%.
Alternatively, try collecting feedback via one-on-one interviews with customers, recording them, and transcribing them. You can get great feedback from usability testing on the product side when you’re trying to diagnose product problems. And it’s important to have some kind of social media monitoring product, where you’re scanning for the sentiment of your customers on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. This will help to understand what kind of real sentiment is going on in places where people are sharing information.
❌ Don’t: Think of NPS as an accurate measure of a customer’s health
Here’s why:
WORKFLOW
Being Busy Doesn’t Mean You’re Being Productive
This piece is written for founders but applies to anyone who has to juggle many responsibilities and a hectic schedule—so everyone, right? Here’s Corey Haines on how to get deep work done. He shares tips on batching similar tasks together, cutting out distractions, delegating shallow work, and more.
GROWTH
Growth Is Sexy, but Not Its Ingredients: Retention and Operations
When most people see business growth, they storm in with questions like, “How do you get clients? How do you close sales? How do you do marketing?” But these people don’t understand what Customer Success leaders have known forever—sales aren’t the key to growth, retention is. And retention isn’t possible if the “nuts and bolts of the business” aren’t figured out.
What NPS Subject Line Drives the Highest Response Rate?
Not done with NPS yet? Head over to Jeff Breunsbach’s LinkedIn post asking commenters to share their highest performing NPS subject lines.
Dave Jackson, CEO of TheCustomer.Co, wrote a popular post on LinkedIn where he argued that ownership in business “creates division.” I disagreed. At ‘nuffsaid, one of our core values is to ensure every decision has one owner.
Dave joined me on the ‘wellsaid podcast to debate this topic. I really enjoyed our conversation, so here’s an excerpt from one of Dave’s most powerful responses.
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I believe ownership is a last-century concept built on the bankrupt idea of hierarchy.
The genesis of this idea is many years in the making and it's based on bitter experience in a way—not about taking ownership of things, but about trying to control things.
I'm not concerned about what you call it: Customer Success, Customer Experience, or customer focus. My understanding is this: if you're going to be truly customer-focused, you need the whole of the organization pointing in that direction. You need the whole of the organization aligned. But the bankrupt thinking piece is that we are still building organizations with silos without thinking about how we need to collaborate and do the right thing for the customer.
As soon as you create a silo, somebody says, “That's mine, go away, leave me to it. Don't do it.” People hoard their areas of ownership. And that in my opinion is what gets in the way of building a truly customer-focused organization.
Chris wrote the following on my post: “If your company really does believe that customer outcomes are shared across everyone, then the CEO can solve this by:
He was dead right. But the problem is that not many CEOs do that. The problem is CEOs still say, “Hey, Marketing, here's your budget. Go away and do that. Sales, you go do that. Come up with the org plans.” Meanwhile, nobody thinks about what this looks like for the customer as a whole. In this way, I believe ownership is bankrupt.
Shared values, team alignment, and OKRs are all vehicles for creating collaboration. The problem is collaboration never appears on an org chart. But it's the most important part of building a successful customer-focused organization. That's the piece that I'm railing against—this lack of collaboration. The idea of, “This is mine, leave it alone.”
Creating a culture of collaboration comes down to the ability of a CEO to break down silos. As a CEO, you must emphasize shared values, alignment, and work on facilitating collaboration company-wide. A CEO should be like an architect.
The first thing any good architect does is to figure out who is using the building. What are their needs and expectations? How can they be delighted? It starts with understanding the user. Then the second thing an architect does is sketch out a high-level blueprint. Once you've got everyone across a company participating and contributing to the overall design, then you can say, “Within the architecture, Marketing - go and do your thing, and Sales - go and do that thing.”
Architecture is not just about walls. It is about how we use spaces—how things flow from one part to another. It's about purposefully designing those parts of the organization that are unseen. There's a saying, “Every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it does.”
The CEO must be the Chief Organization Designer. They must take the lead in forming the architecture, in bringing people together to design the culture, and in ensuring that the company is always thinking back to, “Who are our chosen customers, what are their needs and expectations, and how do we delight them?” Once you've got those mechanisms in place, then you can start to delegate ownership.
There is a lost art of real organization design, which has very little to do with lines and boxes and more about an alignment mechanism. CEOs need to be thoughtful about org design and build out the three pieces of a collaborative architecture.
If there's a fourth piece, it's around metrics. In an ideal world, everyone would be on the same bonus plan based on either Net Revenue Retention or, if you're mature enough, the LTV:CAC ratio. Both of those bring in the whole of the organization and force it to think about how to make the business successful, not just how each department can make its silo successful.
The mistake many leaders make regardless of their department happens when they go to the leadership table. They believe they're there to represent their function, which is wrong. You do the right thing for the business, even if your individual department loses at that point in time.
You're a business leader first and a silo leader second.
ALIGNMENT
Customer Success Is the Most Important Function in a Usage-Based Business
Kyle Poyar, Operating Partner at OpenView, outlines simple ways departments like Marketing, Sales, Product, and Support can do their part to bring the customer closer to their desired outcomes. “Everyone is a CSM now.”
LEADERSHIP
Five Leadership Lessons in Re-Launching a Global CSM Organization
Here’s Janine Sneed, VP of Customer Success at IBM, with 5 takeaways from redesigning her CSM org. She suggests over-communicating the design with team members, investing in a centralized adoption playbook, being accessible by creating “spaces for transparency and radical candor” and more.
STRATEGY
Data Analysis Is an Underrated Customer Success Skill
Brian LaFaille of Google explains how, “[T]he secret weapon to any Customer Success Professional’s toolbox is the ability to interpret, analyze, and tell a story through data.” It’s a learnable skill that’s become increasingly important in CS.
REMOTE WORK
How I’ve Improved My Remote Presentation Setup
This piece is chock full of tactical tips to create a better experience for your listeners when giving presentations or demos. Upgrade your conferencing skills with pointers like “Faking eye contact with the audience,” creating a wall backdrop, and choosing the right lighting.
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
To wrap up Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting the best career advice from the incredible women driving Customer Success. They offer unique and powerful lessons about focusing on what matters, advocating for yourself, building a strong network, and more.
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Mary Poppen, CCO of Glint at LinkedIn
While reflecting on lessons learned throughout my career in Customer Success and Experience, five key principles came to mind (not necessarily in priority order):
Cairo Amani, CX Lead at Cutback Coach and Co-Founder of ThriveNetwork
Build a strong professional brand. Be able to speak confidently to who you are and what you bring to the table. When you walk into a room, no one should get the chance to tell your story except you.
Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, VP Customer Success at Chili Piper
Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” The truths I have learned in my career are that: 1) people are unpredictable, 2) systems can be unfair, and 3) top performers don’t like having a “boss.” Acknowledge these hurdles and choose to focus your energy on driving results.
Georgia Harrison, Senior Director of Customer Success EMEA at Braze
Anita Toth, Churn Consultant
Follow your heart, despite your head and everyone else telling you that it isn't the right path. I've taken jobs that were lower pay, less stable, and harder work because I knew in my heart that ultimately those jobs would bring me to the place I wanted to be in my career. It was hard tuning out the strong voice of my inner head and the external voices of my friends and family. But in the end it worked out far better than if I had gone against what my heart wanted. The career path we take isn't always easy, but you truly do know what's best for you—because your heart tells you.
Emily Garza, AVP of Customer Success at Fastly
Lauren Costella, VP of Customer Success at GoodTime.io
Never be ashamed to fully understand. This advice came from my mentor Jeanine Moss earlier in my career when I worked in Strategic Communications at the Pentagon. People would use jargon and language I didn't understand, and I felt, fairly or not, pressure that I was supposed to know what everyone was talking about to be good at my job, even though I had never been exposed to much of what they were saying. And by golly, sometimes people used so much fluff that what they said didn't have meaning or substance!
She encouraged me to keep asking questions, to keep digging until things were clear or broken down in a way I could understand. I use that technique in both my personal and professional life because communication and, more importantly, understanding between people - customer, client, teammate, colleague, boss, family, or friends - remains critical for any kind of business and/or personal success.
Kim Oslob, Senior Director of Customer Engagement at MeasuringU
Every company and every Customer Success role is different. Align with a strong mentor who has worked in a variety of different situations and can help you in your career. When you have grown in your career, become a mentor to help others grow strong.
Teresa Anania, VP of Global Customer Success and Renewals at Zendesk
Katrina Coakley, Director of Customer Success at talentReef
To anyone new in Customer Success, track your major wins, your losses, and trust yourself. There will be times when you may not take the next right step. Tracking your wins will help to provide clarity on all the times you get it right. Tracking your losses is meaningful as long as you learn from the experience. And trust yourself because no one at the company knows more about your customers than you do.
To Customer Success leaders, write down your “why.” You took on the role for a reason. Determine your priorities and put leadership battles that fall outside of those areas in the parking lot. Spend time with the CSMs you are privileged to lead. And set healthy boundaries for yourself—this includes setting aside time for an activity that you enjoy purely because you enjoy it.
Shirley Chapman, Senior Director of Customer Success Management (EMEA) at Pluralsight
Don’t count yourself out before exploring the possibilities. There is nothing to lose in expressing an interest, even if you think it’s a "not now but later" opportunity. I got my first leadership role because I applied for a position I didn't think I would get, but wanted to experience the process! Ask for feedback and advice from a range of people, inside and outside the company to get different perspectives. Believe in yourself and always bring your best self forward.
Kelly Berg, VP of Customer Success and Solutions at Ambition
Focus on timing. Was it the right time to move across the country for an opportunity or take a risk to join a startup? Was it the right time to ask for more responsibility? Or was it the right time to stick with something through a challenge and come out on the other side? That advice has helped me stay dialed in on maintaining balance between big career moves and my other key values—my family, where I want to live, and what I want each day to look like.
Maranda Dziekonski, SVP of Customer Success and People at Swiftly
I've received a lot of advice over the years, but a few points that have always stuck with me are:
I've always carried these with me, and while I am less than perfect, on occasion, I use them to ground me!
Monica Trivedi, Director of Global Customer Success at Schneider Electric
My best career advice centers around four pillars that have guided me for most of my professional and personal journey: 1) be authentic, 2) challenge the status quo, 3) advocate for what you deserve, and 4) embrace uncertainty.
Shadavia Jones, Scaling Customer Success Team Manager at HubSpot
To build your personal brand within a company, become the expert at something. It is not enough to just be great at your job function. People need to think of you and your skillset when opportunities arise, even if it's unrelated to your role. Find your thing, your foundation that you can build any career on, then reflect on the question, "Am I a good employee, or am I an expert?"
Negotiation is one of the most underrated skills. You're always negotiating on the job—with your clients, your worth when evaluating a new job offer or raise, and especially when you're trying to gain additional experience via strategic projects, so it helps if you're good at it. Negotiation is a muscle that strengthens over time, so start small but be sure to use it frequently.
The Customer Success mantra is typically some version of "put the customer first." My edited version of this is, "put humans first" — yourself included. You won't be able to delight customers if you aren't feeling like your best and most productive self. Do what's best for your customer by showing up as your authentic, well-rested, and energized self—the human in your customer depends on it.
No matter what line of business or role you're in, remember you're in the people business first. People are the foundation for all that you want to achieve over your career. Connect, empathize, and show compassion for them.
INDUSTRY
The Missing Piece of Software Sales
Here’s Rav Dhaliwal with a call to end the dated sales orthodoxy mindset of considering a sale complete at contract signature. He makes the case that Customer Success teams are still in a reactive state because they are “focused on solving the problems of a legacy perpetual license sales motion” instead of being able to drive the “continuous sales” cycle.
COACHING
Change Management in Customer Success
Being able to influence changes in behavior is at the core of the role of a CSM. This article articulates what “change management” includes and shares some scenarios of what it looks like in practice. Consider sharing this article with the team, and continue to reinforce this approach through coaching.
VIRTUAL DISCUSSION
Lessons From Running CS Ops at Zoom, Gainsight, Stack Overflow, & More
On April 22, we’re hosting a live panel discussion on everything CS Ops related. Sign up, submit your questions early, and share the link with your colleagues. (If you can’t attend live, you can still register and get the recording afterwards.)
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
Last week we hosted a panel discussion on creating a low-touch engagement model. The discussion featured Boaz Maor (CCO at talech), Selena Papi (the Director of Customer Experience & Engagement at Talentsoft), and Brian LaFaille (Global Head of Customer Success Strategic Programs at Google).
The conversation was packed with tactics and advice, and you can watch the recording here (or listen to the discussion on the go here). Below you’ll find a (lightly edited) excerpt from one of the highlights of the discussion, when the group shared their thoughts on how to move customers from high-touch into a low-touch segment.
A special thanks to inSided for co-sponsoring this event with us.
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Chris: How do you transition customers that are used to high-touch into a digitally-led engagement model? How do you set expectations properly so they have a good experience?
Selena: Customer Success teams need to lead with the “reason” the transition is happening. Are customers being transferred because a company is changing its customer relationship strategy and segmentation? Or is the customer downsizing and reducing the number of licenses? The approach will change based on the reason why the customer is moving into the low-touch segment.
And the communication should be transparent: share the reason why the transition is happening and focus on the benefits of the new, low-touch experience.
I’ll share an experience I had with one of my vendors that was very poorly handled for contrast. The company reached out to me via email saying, “Starting today, Selena, you don't have the right to a CSM anymore. Attached is the pricing list for a CSM. Otherwise, you’re moving to low-touch.”
Chris: Oh no.
Brian: That’s bad. That’s really bad.
Selena: I agree. If a customer is used to a high-touch approach, you cannot just move them with an email to low-touch with no empathy or explanation. Your high-touch CSM needs to explain the transition, proactively communicate this change ahead of time, and be considerate about the changes involved in transferring from a high to low-touch digital experience.
Boaz: I have two suggestions on that point. The first is, it's very common to grandfather existing customers in who become used to a certain price. Most companies change pricing schemes as their customer base grows. As long as you're a fast-growing company, it doesn't matter if you grandfather a small percentage of that customer base. The same goes for level of service. If you have customers who get used to a certain service level, leave them be as your processes change and as your company moves forward. It will take care of itself.
My second point is, the experience Selena had was the perfect example of what not to do. You don't email a customer and tell them you’re reducing the level of service.
You call them and say:
It's more, not less. The “more” is in the scaled mechanism as opposed to the one-to-one. It's almost common sense, right? You don't need to be a Customer Success expert for this.
Brian: That soundbite of you Boaz is so good. Just put that on repeat and let that sink in. As you are moving customers from a one-to-one motion, it should not be that you're taking the service level down or away. You're supplementing it in a different way. You're giving the choice to users: the choice to watch videos on YouTube, the choice to use a learning management system, the choice to engage with a CSM if they want to.
As you bring down the number of accounts in a CSM portfolio, you simultaneously have to ramp up your digital experience. As a customer, if resources are ripped away, like in Selena’s case, I would have PTSD and I’d churn from that account. To be honest, I have very high expectations of my vendors.
Boaz: Exactly. If you enable customers more with a learning management system for example, and they don't use it, that's not their problem. It's yours. What you offered didn't work. Offer something else.
The point is not, “How can I minimize service?” Rather it's, “How do I optimize results?” If the customer doesn’t buy into what you offered, then fix it, change it, or do something different.
Brian: That's so good. On that point, Boaz, going digitally-led means giving users the choice to pick from a learning channel that resonates best for them. There are individuals from our customer base who have implemented Looker previously. They just want emails and they're very docs heavy—they don’t want to talk to a CSM, they just want the docs. There's no need for us to get involved there. But there are other customers that want more of a one-to-one experience. We can offer that if a customer chooses that path.
Another piece I want to call out is that before any changes happen towards implementing a digitally-led engagement model, you need to have internal enablement about the pivot. Other teams, department heads, and leadership need to be bought in. They need to understand the benefits of the transition and who to align with if not the CSM of an account. The company as a whole has to see the benefits of a scaled approach and know that motion will help the company scale.
The second thing is, the transition cannot transpire like this: “Oh, we decided that in Q1 we're going to move all of our customers under 50K into scale. Then we're going to send an email about how they can pay for a CSM if they want.” No. You have to wait for a natural point in the customer lifecycle to make this transition.
At Google, we use the renewal to make a change and we position it with very positive language: “Hey customer, you've graduated. As a CSM, I can't do much more. You're using the product in a mature manner, your license utilization is high, you just renewed, and we've got all these different offerings to support you. Congratulations. You got to the next phase of maturity.”
CAREER
The 40 Best Interview Questions as a Candidate
Most content about interview questions is written for the interviewers. This article flips the script and offers a path for candidates to “treat companies like they’re an investor” and ask questions that uncover vital information about the opportunity.
STRATEGY
Feedback Is a Gift
Kristi Faltorusso, VP of CS at IntelliShift, offers an inside look at her survey strategy—the questions her team asks customers at each stage of their journey.
COMMUNICATION
Write Simply
In his most recent article, Paul Graham makes the case for writing simply. “Use ordinary words,” he says. “When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool.”
To wrap up this week’s newsletter, here’s a fun piece that may resonate: I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Too Much Pressure on Me
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
The following is Max’s response to the question, “What does your interview process look like for CSMs at Intercom and how has that model evolved?
When I joined Intercom as a CSM, the hiring process went like this: apply online, receive a written test, then interview with the Head of Customer Success.
Some parts of that model still exist. But since stepping into a leadership role, we’ve also evolved the process in two major ways: there have been changes to the written test (and it now includes a video test, too), and we’ve added a session that’s completely dedicated to having candidates ask the interviewer questions.
My first boss at Intercom instilled a core belief within me: when you're hiring, one fundamental skill to assess is writing. If an interviewee can think through a problem and compose their answer in a neat way, they likely can do the same verbally. But the proof is in the pudding—and my director’s team was renowned for their talent and tenure.
We’ve included an at-home written test as part of our hiring process since before I joined. But now, along with the written portion, we also have candidates record select answers via video on Loom or similar.
Here’s what the at-home test includes:
Video:
Written:
3.1 What makes you a power user of it?
3.2 If you could make one change, what would it be?
4.1 How would you decide which accounts to work on first?
4.2 Why would you take that approach?
As you can see, the questions vary in complexity. But to me, the most telling piece is how candidates respond to the question, “How would you describe Intercom to someone with zero technical knowledge?” Those who have empathy for their audience and who understand our product at a basic level, usually start by saying, “I'm going to describe this in a way that my granny, my granddad, or my mom and dad would understand.” Whenever someone begins that way, I know I’ve hit a gold mine—I’m about to hear a beautiful articulation of what our platform does. This question points to a good fit because the best CSMs know how to turn complex topics into easy-to-understand terms.
Better than any other medium, these videos also capture two areas that signify a good CSM:
The first—energy and passion. Are they genuinely interested in our company? Do they show real excitement? How passionate are they in the mission of Intercom? These qualities will shine through in a video.
In hiring, I care far more about passion than experience. You could’ve worked at a top company for decades, but if you don’t exude substantial enthusiasm for Intercom, I’ll keep looking. That’s not just for our own self interest in hiring, but also for the candidates. The #1 piece of career advice I give everyone—family, friends, or anyone asking me for it—is to first find companies that you’re passionate about. If you’re not passionate about a company, then why do you want to work there? Why would you waste your life away working for a company that doesn’t excite you? Ultimately if you can find a company you’re passionate about and you land a job there, the world is really your oyster. You’ll be happy and the company should be happy.
The second reason we ask candidates to use video is to assess how comfortable they are recording themselves. Our CSMs are on video calls day in and day out. They often record customer videos to share information at scale, or to send tailored messages. Fundamentally, if a person doesn’t exude the kind of confidence on camera that will engage or de-escalate customers, they might not be best suited as a CSM at Intercom.
Once a potential candidate has passed a quick screening call and the take-home test, they schedule a call with me. Instead of quizzing them (“tell me about your strengths and weaknesses”), I leave the session completely open for a candidate to ask me questions. Interviewees need to know if they’re making the right decision with their career and feel comfortable progressing to an onsite. Plus, if candidates don’t ask questions, they might not have the intellectual curiosity that we like to see in CSMs.
The written and video tests were designed to give me answers, now it’s the interviewees’ turn to ask questions. I'm there to explain everything: the role, company, team, leadership, vision, company culture, and my management style.
Some leaders consider this “question asking session” an odd practice. But Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal and it’s the CSM’s job to be personal and empathetic to their customers. And since the first part of our interview doesn’t involve talking to anyone, it's only right to allow candidates a chance to know with absolute certainty they are making the right career choice.
INDUSTRY
The Age of the Customer
Here’s a LinkedIn post from Hubspot’s CCO, Yamini Rangan, with takeaways from the CX Spotlight 2021 Conference. In short, it’s “the age of the customer” and companies that bring the customer to the core of their business will rapidly outperform those that don’t.
FEEDBACK
One Thing You Can Do This Month That Will Level-up Every CSM on Your Team
“Being a CSM can be a lonely role....You have very little exposure to how other CSMs are working with their customers, or feedback about the QBR or customer meeting you just ran.” This article makes the case for adding a new process for feedback within your team: “Add peer-to-peer feedback as part of your MBOs this quarter. Meaning each CSM shadows other CSMs in the field and provides immediate, actionable feedback.”
LEADERSHIP
Force Isn’t Power
Ed Batista explains why people who are earlier in their careers, believing they lack power, can tend to “act forcefully in order to have the desired effect. But later in [their] careers and at more senior levels, when [they] likely possess much more power than before, continuing to act forcefully can be unnecessary and even counterproductive.”
HIRING
9 Questions to Ask Candidates for Your First Head of Customer Success
Here’s Jason Lemkin with a quick interview checklist for the first CS leadership hire. For example: “Find out what their #1 core KPI has been. Some don't even know. Don't hire those ones.”
Success Happy Hour is a weekly newsletter for Customer Success leaders. Each week we feature one digestible piece of advice or a framework from a top Success leader, along with the best resources from that week. Subscribe here.
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