TheySaid Newsletter

From an interview with:

Many Sales orgs can be resistant to bringing in Customer Success before the deal is closed. It’s only natural; Sales wants to be in control of every aspect of the deal, so bringing in an additional person to talk to the customer can add a level of uncertainty. 

Since I joined Lucidworks, we’ve evolved our process from having a distinct handoff between Sales and CS to one where the AE brings in the CSM when they’re around 70% to closing the deal. This provides a much better experience for the customer for two reasons: 

1. The customer doesn’t have to repeat anything. The Success person gets looped into the customer’s situation and goals early and is able to help them get value out of the product much faster.
2. The customer gets to see what it’s like to work with Lucidworks. That’s going to give the customer much more confidence and increase the AE’s likelihood of closing the deal.

Evolving this process requires a cultural shift and it doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s some of my advice for others looking to make this transition:

1. Positioning to Sales: Since Sales can get territorial, we needed to continuously tell them, “Hey, we’re here to add onto what you’re doing—we’re not here to take anything away. We want to help close the deal by making sure the customer feels comfortable that when they sign the contract, they know they’re going to be taken care of.” This takes time and a lot of relationship-building with your peers and the sales reps, but it’ll start to get easier when they see you prove the value—and when they see how the customers respond to being able to work with their CSM before the deal is closed. It’s been less than one year and we’re already used to having the Sales team reaching out and asking to bring CSMs in to their deals, to tell the potential customers what it’s like to work with Lucidworks. 
2. Positioning to customers: Sales and Success should also explain to customers why the CSM is joining calls before the deal is closed. The idea here is to say, “When you come to Lucidworks, we’re going to take care of you. We already know your situation and the goals you have—you won’t have to repeat every single thing you’ve told Sales, then the Sales engineer, then everyone else you’ve talked to. We document these things and they’re handed off to everyone working with you. And your CSM has already been working with you so they can help you realize value quicker.” Then, you can also position this as doing a proof of concept with the CSM. “Think of us as part of the POC. You get the chance to actually understand what it’s like to work with us before you make a commitment.” 

3. Show the value at every opportunity. As Sales starts to bring in Success earlier, make sure to get qualitative and quantitative feedback—from Sales, the Success team, and the customers. Ask the Success team to share any and all comments they’re seeing about the change in the process. Then, report back on what your team is seeing on the front lines. If you can show that customers appreciate being able to meet the CSM, that will help other (more hesitant) Sales team members see the value.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• GitLab's Customer Success Vision
• Why Writing in Remote Work Matters
• Tips to Take Friction Out of Your Sales Cycle
• 10 Years in Tech

STRATEGY

GitLab's Customer Success Vision

GitLab is uniquely thorough and transparent with their internal documentation. Here’s how they’ve mapped out their customer journey, where they see Success headed in terms of responsibility, their KPIs, how they specify churn, and more.

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COMMUNICATION

Why Does Writing Matter in Remote Work?

Here’s an insightful take on why using writing as your main communication channel makes teams more efficient and inclusive.

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PROCESS

50 Top Tips to Take Friction Out of Your Sales Cycle

Here’s a list of tips and techniques from founders, CEOs, and CROs at companies like Brex and Shopify on reducing friction in sales cycles—but much of the advice listed are applicable for CS teams as well. 

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INDUSTRY

10 Years in Tech

Geoff Roberts, Co-founder of Outseta, provides candid observations from his 10 years of work within the tech industry. He attempts to give “an objective look at the world of technology start-ups—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

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An excerpt from:

Gauging customer health during the pandemic  

The burning question among Success leaders right now is, “How do I check in with my customers to gauge churn risk without sounding tone-deaf?”

Emails to customers asking “whether they’d recommend the company to a friend,” talking contract terms, or blindly pushing recent product updates can risk the company sounding too vendor-focused or insensitive. But there are no guidebooks or frameworks on assessing churn risk during a global pandemic, so for lack of tested alternatives it’s only natural that Success teams are leaning on tools like NPS. 

Here's an alternative way to assess churn risk amid COVID-19:

1. Look at the sectors most impacted by COVID-19. Some industry sectors have been impacted more than others; a customer in Tourism should be approached differently than one in Pharmaceuticals or Online Retail. Ask CSMs to map their customers into “high exposure,” “moderate exposure,” and “low exposure” industries as in the graphic from Moody’s (which can be viewed in this blog post). Once this exercise is complete, Success teams can measure how much revenue is up for renewal in each exposure category, and prioritize customers that need the most immediate attention.
2. Create a playbook based on each level of industry risk. Build templates for reaching out to customers in each level of exposure. For high risk customers, as an open-ended question about how you can support them. Give moderate customers the chance to pick from a menu of options, like delayed payment terms or discounts. For low risk, open a channel for them to make an ask if they need to. Tell them their renewal date is coming up and to let you know if their business is encountering any economic challenges. 
3. Take into account how customers have previously been influenced by pricing. Right now, price rules everything. Even companies in low exposure industries will want to cut some extraneous costs. This is a time when everyone is more sensitive to overall expenses. So to tailor the outreach, ask CSMs to look at how discounts have affected customers in the past. 

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• A Bias to Action
• Scaling Customer Success
• Executing an Executive Sponsor Program
• A Great Team Doesn't Make You a Great Manager

CULTURE

A Bias to Action

“Many CEOs face similar challenges of keeping a growing organization executing with the same relentless and risk-taking spirit of the early days.” Here, Henry Ward, CEO at Carta, shares an internal memo he wrote in February 2020 to get the company back to their core values. 

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SCALING

The CCO's Guide to Scaling Customer Success

Jennifer Dearman (Pendo’s CCO) offers her best advice on evolving a Customer Success org for scale—with detailed strategies for setting team structure, segmenting customers, and more.

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STRATEGY

Executing a Successful Executive Sponsor Program

Losing a customer due to “weak executive sponsorship” shouldn’t be an acceptable cause—this problem occurs when CSMs don’t have a playbook to build the right level of champions in an account. Here, Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative teams up with Alejandro Sanchez of Adzerk to give the critical steps to build an effective Executive Sponsor program complete with aligning, designing, and following-up. 

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LEADERSHIP

A Great Team Does Not Make You a Great Manager

“Far too many managers prefer to be reporters instead of investors.” This timeless (and concise) piece makes the case that managers should be able to make deep connections with their team and create individualized plans for improvement.

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From an interview with:

One of the first pieces of thought leadership around Customer Success that came out was that “you can’t treat all customers the same.” You have to segment on something. 

That’s true of course, but unfortunately some companies focus solely on the high-touch experience. And frankly, I get it. It’s easier. Fewer customers; more love. It’s much harder to touch customers at scale.

I’m a proponent of creating a model that affects all customers at the same time, instead of just focusing on or starting with one segment. I also don’t believe that customers should be segmented solely based on ARR—when I joined Pendo, we created a segmentation strategy that has an ARR threshold but also heavily accounts for customer preferences (some customers prefer self-service and don’t want a regular 1:1 with a CSM) and growth potential (some customers, even enterprise, aren’t expected to expand). 

That’s how Pendo Neighborhood was born. It’s a fully digital experience for customers to get the resources they need, stay close to the product, and be part of a community. One notable difference between ours and most customer communities: the Neighborhood has CSMs specifically dedicated to support customers in this experience. 

The Neighborhood delivers a high-quality experience for customers and continues to maintain far above average renewal rates. That’s true whatever the customer size, but the experience is particularly impactful for small customers. Small customers are unique in that they can get a lot of synergy from each other in terms of how to leverage your product. Putting those customers together and creating a forum for them is important. 

Creating a scale program that retains high renewal rates isn’t just a nice-to-have either. It’s table stakes for a customer success program. Small customers tend to be the first to churn.

So, how can others create a scale program like the Pendo Neighborhood? Here’s some advice:

1. Start now and iterate: There’s no shame in starting small. If you try to wait until you have all the building blocks in place, you’ll never launch anything. 
2. Hosting: Pendo Neighborhood started out as a Slack channel with a few CSMs dedicated to supporting customers in that experience. Questions get repeated all the time, and you can’t store answers in Slack but it was a great starting point. The experience is now moving to be hosted on Zendesk. Zendesk is our support platform, but we have the Enterprise package and it has the ability to build community forums. 
3. Have dedicated CSMs to this experience: This can be a real differentiator. It allows customers to have on-demand access to a human. Customers can also file support tickets right within the Neighborhood. As for support questions, we have a support team, but oftentimes customer questions get answered by other customers since it’s a community forum. 
4. Make resources around their jobs to be done easily to access: We’ve built out an in-app onboarding experience and targeted in-app and email guidance around use cases. We’ve also focused on making sure our help center is robust. Ours is highly searchable and easy to access since it also lives in the Neighborhood. 

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Capacity Planning
• Ways for Leaders to Build Resilience
• Fixing the "Overselling" Problem 
• Mistakes New Managers Often Make

CAPACITY PLANNING

Customer Success Capacity Planning Calculator

If you’ve ever asked, “How many CSMs do we need to give our customers their Appropriate Experience (AX)?” You’ll find this calculator and framework from Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures helpful as a starting point for managing a team’s workload. 

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LEADERSHIP

4 Ways for Leaders to Build Resilience

Here’s Alex Shootman, CEO at Workfront, with a concise but powerful piece on responding to the current crisis with empathy and vulnerability. It’s peppered with wisdom such as, “You need to see yourself on the other side of this crisis,” “take the time to reflect and hold a debrief... There will be lessons to learn from your organization’s response to Covid-19,” and more.

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STRATEGY

COVID-19 Causing Sales to Oversell? It's the Success Leader's Problem to Fix

When “bad deals” are being closed, it’s easy to point a finger at sales and say they're lying and overselling. But the reality is, if bad deals are happening, it's the Customer Success leader’s responsibility to solve. Here’s how to diagnose and repair the problems that lead to bad deals. 

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CAREER

9 Leadership Mistakes New Managers Often Make

Here’s a quick list of “don’ts” from Claire Lew, CEO at Know Your Team—written for new managers but applicable to leaders at any level. See timely reminders such as, “You think your team members generally know what’s going on,” “You think you communicate the vision in your team well,” and “You sort of prepare for your one-on-ones.”

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Written by:

“How do you prevent CS from becoming an overblown support team for enterprise?” — The President of a prominent tech company asked me this question today.

It’s a great question. I believe this is a contributing factor to some of the Customer Success reductions we're seeing in SaaS right now: CS teams have become indistinguishable from support. And therefore putting unnecessary stress on Gross Margins.

So how can Success leaders make sure their function is seen for what it is—part of the go-to-market function—and not an unnecessary cost to the business? Here’s my advice: 

1. 1. Make sure Support and Sustaining Engineering are performing well. When the CSM—the person who is supposed to be proactively investing in the customer’s success—is having to constantly jump in and put out fires, they get stuck in a reactive mode. Leaders can make sure there’s a sentiment analysis engine in place that’s tracking the back and forth customer communication, that notifies CSMs when a customer conversation needs their attention. They can also review how customers are responding to the feedback mechanisms that the support team has in place, and from an Engineering standpoint they can see whether the number of weekly bugs fixed is higher than the number of bugs reported.
   2. Make sure all incentives align towards retention and your growth targets. Pay, promotions, performance evaluations, leaderboards, team wins and celebrations, and recognition in 1:1s should all be around revenue retention and growth. It encourages a mindset shift away from being focused on tasks and support. 

   3. Give CSMs a relationship development goal. Meaning, how many contacts and at what levels do we need a relationship to succeed? An example playbook when selling into the enterprise is to follow the 1, 2, 3 rule. For each account, the CS leader should have one executive sponsor, two champions, and three power users. The Success leader provides detailed tasks for CSMs to build from champion to power user, and from champion to executive sponsor, and then measures progress across the portfolio. This way, if any of these people leave, the Success leader will have enough relationship coverage to recoup before it impacts the renewal.

   4. Make CSMs responsible for harvesting references, reviews and success stories. Even referrals if possible. CS leaders can start by breaking it down for the team. Think about everyone who wants something from your customers: Product wants to talk to customers for validating and developing new features, Product Marketing wants to do interviews for refining their ICP, for pricing, or for case studies, and the UX/Design and Brand teams want to survey customers as well. Your customers are in high demand. So as a CS leader, you need to prioritize what’s most important for the team to move the needle on your retention and growth targets. Create goals around the activities you want to incentivize, then communicate with your peers about what they can expect from your team in the next quarter.
   5. Ensure that CSMs understand how the company adds value beyond just using the product. It’s not enough to say that when a customer uses the product, that means they’ve received value. Make sure you as the CS leader are clear on the true indicators that customers have received value, and then make sure every playbook in the company is oriented around ensuring and validating whether that value has been received.


The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Who Should Own Renewals and Upsells
• Advice for Quickly Advancing in Customer Success
• Give Immediate Feedback
• How to Keep Your Team Connected While Working Remotely

STRATEGY

Who Should Own Renewals and Upsells: Sales or Customer Success? 

Whether Sales or Success should own commercial activities with customers is one of the more highly debated topics, but there aren’t many actionable frameworks for companies to use when grappling over this decision internally. Here’s Boaz Maor (CCO at Talech) and Jay Nathan (Managing Partner at Customer Imperative) with one of the best I’ve seen.

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CAREER

Advice for Quickly Advancing in Customer Success

Kristina Valkanoff, Head of Customer Success at Carta, offers advice for establishing a high-growth career in Success and how to make the transition to managing at a higher level. 

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STRATEGY

Give Immediate Feedback Because Feedback Has a Short Half-Life

Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, reminds us to not wait until the next 1:1 to provide feedback. “If you have a beef with somebody in your personal life, it would never occur to you to wait for a formally scheduled meeting to tell them.” Here are her tips on how to give timely feedback in the workplace.

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REMOTE WORK

How to Keep Your Team Connected After a Sharp Transition to Remote Work

“Work from home, not work alone.” Wojciech Zaremba, Co-founder of OpenAI, offers a list of ways to keep your (remote) team connected and supported. Among his list, try “group lunches over zoom,” or “remote happy hours.”

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From an interview with:

All customers aspire to work with the “trusted partner” CSM. This CSM deeply understands the industry, the product, and the different verticals of customers. The customer trusts them enough to incorporate the practices and use cases the CSM recommends. 

Customers generally don’t want to exclusively work with junior members of the Success organization.  

The problem is, Customer Success owns less budget than other departments in most companies, so there’s a limit to how senior of CSMs we can attract. We need to be able to hire junior CSMs with potential, and then grow them into senior CSMs that aren’t just building strong relationships but are also providing expertise and guidance—we want customers to value the opinion of their CSMs. 
Here’s some advice on how to bridge the gap: 

1. Hire for potential. Consider hiring people with some consulting experience. This is a great recruiting ground for CS; consultants develop the ability to understand what customers are trying to solve.
2. Get clear on the role. Get super clear on what you’re asking CSMs to do. What are the highest value activities you want them focusing on? Then, see if you can give the other activities to associate CSMs. Most organizations don’t have “associate CSMs” but I think they should: it trains the associates while freeing up time for the subject matter experts to the more impact work.
3. Help CSMs grow the skills to manage bigger accounts. Teach them to get a thorough understanding of how customers are using the product, so they can identify patterns and be able to teach customers about how other companies of similar size or industry are using the product. Also, train CSMs on how to speak about the product to different audiences within the same company. 

4. Train CSMs to develop their expertise. Teach them how to speak at a strategic level not just about the company’s product, but the problems in the overall space—including the processes and best practices that other companies are implementing.
5. 
Move away from the “project manager CSM” mindset. As organizations, we need shift our mindsets from thinking of CSMs as “quarterbacks” where they’re the ones coordinating, getting all the right people on the field (when the CSM doesn’t know the answer, they can point the customer in the right direction). Eventually, the customer just wants to work directly with the person who’s giving them the answers. CSMs need subject-matter expertise in order to deliver on the “trusted partner” promise, and the “quarterback” analogy does not sufficiently describe the role of the CSM.

The top articles this week: 

This week's newsletter features posts on: 

• Navigating COVID-19
• Building a Knowledge Sharing Loop in Customer Success
• Why Customer Success Leaders Aren't Getting a Seat at the Table
• How to Onboard New Hires Now

COVID-19

Navigating This Crisis: How to Bring in More Capital

First Round Review’s “field guide” for navigating the current crisis is, in a word, comprehensive. Chapter #6 offers three strategies for extending your runway, including how to bring in more revenue from customers. See how to “focus on getting paid upfront from your stickiest customers,” and “learn from your customers as much as you can.” 

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PROCESS

Brew and Review: Building a Knowledge Sharing Loop for Customer Success

“Riding along on calls isn’t enough.” Nicole Rashied, Customer Success Manager at Intercom, breaks down the process her Success team uses to share knowledge about use cases, talk tracks, and more.

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STRATEGY

Why Customer Success Leaders Aren't Getting a Seat at the Table

With only lagging metrics in their toolset, Success leaders can’t really drive strategy at the executive level. Here’s a list of leading indicators of renewal, and an explanation on how Success leaders can use those insights to drive strategic discussions.

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ONBOARDING

How to Onboard New Hires Now

Here’s Lish Gates, Sr Manager - Global Revenue Enablement at Algolia, with a cheat sheet on how to integrate a new hire into your team and culture remotely. Some gems: “Social distancing doesn’t equal being socially distant” and “If you’re doing back-to-back Zoom training, you’re likely doing it wrong.”  

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