In our new episode of the Mastering CS, Candid Leader Insights podcast, Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing at Custify, sat down with Mark Stagi, VP of Customer Success at Avoma.
Mark shares how his experiences as a marathon runner and father shape his leadership style, emphasizing the importance of personal goals, maintaining a learning mindset, and balancing work with stress-relief activities.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to balance work life and personal life
- The importance of a customer success team
- How to prioritize customer success in a startup
- How can CS help in the acquisition process
Key insights and takeaways for CSMs based on the interview:
Understanding the customer is key in early-stage startups: Matt emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding the customer’s needs and experimenting quickly to find the right fit, especially in the early stages of building a Customer Success function.
Scaling requires a different approach than starting from scratch: While both starting and scaling are challenging, Mark highlights that scaling teams in established companies involves refining processes and playbooks, whereas early-stage startups demand flexibility, experimentation, and a builder mindset.
Hiring entrepreneurial talent is crucial for startup success: In the early stages, bringing in team members with an entrepreneurial mindset and the ability to build alongside leadership is critical for driving Customer Success and company growth.
Customer Success is about continuous learning and adaptation: Whether dealing with customers or teams, adopting a learning mindset and being open to evolving strategies is essential for navigating the complexities of scaling customer success functions.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina 0:02
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we deep dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today’s guest is Mark Stagi, VP of Customer Success at Avoma. Mark, welcome and thanks for joining us today!
Mark 0:21
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to the conversation.
Irina 0:24
I always like to start by getting to know the story behind the guest I’m talking to. So I know that you are a marathon runner and an awesome dad, and I’m curious, how do these two roles, runner and father, shape your approach to leadership, CS, and life in general? Let’s start with that.
Mark 0:45
Yeah, no, love it. And I think the awesome dad piece, it depends on the day when you ask my kids what their answer would be, especially now that they’ve grown, since I’ve put that in my profile and they’re teenagers, they may not agree all the time. But I think for me overall, I always think of the fact that us as humans, we are very unique.
We have our own DNA. We have our own fingerprints that are very unique. And our story is so intertwined.
You can’t separate, in my opinion, your work life from your personal life. And they are very, very intertwined. And for me too, I think running and being a dad impact my professional life a ton.
I’ll start with the running. I think one thing that’s always important for me is one, to have goals in life, whatever that may be. So the first marathon that I ran, which was years ago, and since then I’ve run much smaller distances.
I got my daughter to finally run with me just last weekend and we ran a 5k, which was not as much of an accomplishment in some ways, but it also was a huge accomplishment because she ran a race for the first time. She enjoyed it. She got to train with me a little bit.
But I think it’s important in life just to have goals that are professional, of course, but personal goals that you have. And it could be something like running, but it could be anything. So I’ve always just found a lot of just positivity from saying, okay, let’s set a goal and let’s try and hit that.
And with running for me, it’s easy because you can very simply join a race that could be anything from a 5k to a marathon or one of the ultra marathons. And you have a goal in mind, you have a date in mind, and you can just train for that and focus solely on that. So it gives a very simple tactical thing for me to focus on.
And it keeps you healthy as well. Like anything exercise, I’m a believer on, I think it will give you more motivation in life. Working at startups, pretty much most of my career, you do need that extra energy in your life to be able to take early calls, late calls, and all that.
So for running, it’s just always been one of my passions and my love. And in terms of being a dad, I mean, I think anyone out there that has kids knows, you learn so much being a parent, a mother, a father, whatever you are, there is so much that you have to do to shape these kids. And every cycle they go through, every phase is unique and different.
So you just learn things in terms of leadership and coaching. I’ve also coached their sports teams in the past. So that’s been another coaching aspect that has honed my skills.
But I think I learn things all the time from them when they’re not trying to do something, they’re not passionate about something, and I’m trying to inspire them. That goes hand in hand with how you inspire your team. So there’s learnings that I have every single day, probably as a father that applies to scaling and leading a team in tech.
Irina 4:02
I can second that, because I also have a daughter, which is not a teenager, and I can’t say that I’m waiting for that period. But what I’ve learned from her is basically how to negotiate or how to not negotiate with terrorists, as I did in some cases, how to basically timebox the things, how to say no in some cases. So yeah, I second everything that you said.
And indeed, being a mom changed totally the perception. Irina, prior to my daughter, is definitely a different, well, I’m a different version than I used to be without, or when I didn’t have my daughter. So I totally relate to the things that you said.
Work-life balance
And I know things can be pretty busy when you are combining the two things, plus your own passions. I want to ask you, how do you balance everything? And what’s your go-to strategy when things get crazy?
Well, do things get crazy in your case?
Mark 5:10
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, things get crazy every single day for me.
I don’t think that there’s a day that’s not crazy. And the two things that I try and really focus on is one, I do just always want to have a learning atmosphere or learning mindset. So every time that I am dealing with a lot going on, and there’s a little bit of chaos or stress or whatever that may be, I try and just take a step back and think about, okay, what can I do to learn from this situation?
And even though there may be chaos, where’s it coming from? There’s always a learning in there. And it may be a learning from, just like you said, how to not negotiate with terrorists.
Try and take that and just take a few minutes to decompress, think about it. Think about what you can do differently, what you can do better. So having that learning mindset is important.
But then the running piece actually comes in very handy for that too, because that is probably my one stress reliever. So as things do get crazy, either early morning or many times like late evening too, I’ll just go out and say, hey, there’s a lot going on, I need 15 minutes. And it might be just run a quick mile and a half, but clear my mind and make sure that I am recharged and then think back about what I’m grateful for in life.
Because even with a lot going on, there’s a lot to be grateful for. So when I do that, then it doesn’t matter how much I work or how much is going on, it all becomes worth it.
Irina 6:45
I try to balance it, but it’s not something that I incorporate in my routine. I try to balance it with swimming. It’s something that I started doing.
So I think sports do play an important role in all those mix and it helps you basically balance everything. Not speaking about the endorphin and the way you feel after you are running or swimming or doing an intensive sport, the physical activity.
Mark 7:16
Yeah. Yeah. No, totally agree.
Starting from scratch vs scaling a team
Irina 7:19
I want to ask you, because you mentioned earlier working in different startups, but all your career scaling teams, and I know that you made them both. So you also build companies and you have that entrepreneurial part, but you also had a role in existing companies where you scale teams. Which do you find more challenging, starting from scratch or scaling something that’s already working?
How is it in your case? And how do you approach them? Are they different?
Let’s speak about that.
Mark 7:59
So it’s a great question. And I do believe that, and it’s not like a cop-out answer, but I believe that neither one is more difficult. I think both are equally difficult, but you’re right.
The approach is really what is unique and different. So when you’re at a very, very small startup, because I’ve been at startups from early, early stage where they’re just getting going, kind of first customers. You don’t know if there’s a lot of product market fit.
And with that, a lot of what you have to do that’s unique and different is really just get out and meet with customers if you have any yet, or if you don’t, meet with as many people within your ICP as you can, and really start to understand who the customer is. But then you have to just be in this mode of experimentation very, very quick. So I always think that when you’re building something from scratch, you’re not going to have the magic answer.
No matter how many similar companies you’ve been at and you’ve built your own playbooks, you can never go in with a playbook and say, oh, let me just plug this right in and this is going to work. You have to really have a firm understanding of everything that’s going on within that company. And again, that ICP, which will be slightly different company to company.
So having this real focus on experimentation, where you and the team together, and I think it’s always important too that at that stage, you hire the right people that are more builders than anything. So even people that have ran their companies before, and people that have that entrepreneurial spirit, where they can work with you. So it’s not just you as the leader saying, I’m going to create this whole foundation for the team, I’m going to hire people, I’m going to build playbooks, I’m going to build all this stuff that we need to scale in two, three, four years.
But getting people that share that vision then can help you. And then iterating very, very quickly. And iterating, of course, with data, but sometimes also, you won’t have the data.
So you need to experiment, have your hypothesis, see what works very quickly. And some of it will be half data-driven. And sometimes it’s going to be just your gut, like you’ve talked to a few customers, anecdotally, you know that that decision worked or didn’t work, and then change it.
But it’s this like, reinventing yourself almost on a weekly basis, though, it has to be like that quick. Whereas when you’re a larger company, I think, one, it’s a little bit more hard to turn the ship. So you can’t experiment as quick, you should still have that in your DNA, I believe.
But the main difference is, you’re going to have already a lot of data set up. So I think there, the skill set from a leader perspective, the skill set does switch a lot more into being very, very data driven, being able to go into all the data that you have, and really see, you know, what is impacting the customer journey, what you need to do to shift process, and then still running your experiments, but it’s just in a, in a slightly different way, where again, it’s probably a lot more, it is a lot more data driven.
And you’re going to spend a little bit more time to make sure that if you’re turning a bigger ship, you’re not going to turn it, and then you’re way off course, because to turn it back is a lot more difficult.
Irina 11:25
I’m curious, you mentioned about different set of skills, depending on type of if you are working in a startup versus a more mature organization, I had this, I would say assumption or not necessarily gut feeling, but I’m curious what, what’s your point of view?
I think that depending, depending on the moment, where the company is, the team structure, the roles and the responsibilities, and as you mentioned, the set skill changes. So what used to work as a setup, when you are starting would definitely be different in six months, or in one year as the company and as the team gets more mature?
What’s your view? And how do you set up? Or how do you manage the team’s expectation?
Because I know that, or I used to hear a lot that in startups, everything changes, and there’s no, and what used to be a priority, it’s no longer a priority, and things are frustrating because we do not manage to keep a clear vision. And it’s not like you don’t have that vision, but things change, and you have to adapt. So I think there’s always a conflict because you have this thing with, okay, we are constantly changing things versus the team that comes with why don’t we keep the same strategy for one year or for two years?
How do you do this?
Mark 13:05
Yeah, so I think there’s a couple things in there that are interesting to talk through. One being, typically at a startup, your, your grand vision, your larger vision doesn’t change that often. It does, it does change.
But that’s, that’s still rare. Again, the six startups that I’ve been at, I think there’s only been two, like very specific cases where we’ve had to shift strategy completely. And probably one that was a huge shift, the other one that was not as big.
A lot of times, though, things shift often. And, you know, like you said, that can cause chaos, if not managed properly, though. So I always think about whenever leading any team, and this isn’t CS, this is just like leadership in general, my beliefs, which are unique and different.
There’s so many different like flavors of leadership. But as long as the team knows, here’s our grand vision. So here’s really our five year plan, our five year vision, which, again, will not change holistically.
Typically, it may change in little minute pieces. And then, as long as you’re communicating with them very, very often. So I typically like to have team meetings, of course, and have one on ones and all that with the team.
But also I send out kind of my Sunday night thoughts every week to the team, which really are a way for me to communicate more strategic vision of what we’re doing, what I’m focused on where we’re heading. So I always make sure they know this five year plan, they know the long game, and then the 10, 15 things that we need to do to hit that will change, and those will change pretty often. But if I’m communicating with them, hey, the long term vision is still here.
But we’ve learned this in the last few months. And this is now changing our perspective on next quarter and what we’re going to focus on next quarter. So instead of focusing on X, we’re going to now focus on Y.
And now we’re also going to, as we’re making the shift, measure this, provide insights, what’s working, what’s not working, and just being very transparent along the way. And I think that helps people a ton. People know that a startup is going to shift a little bit.
So as long as you’re giving them a very transparent view into the little shifts that happen, why they’re happening, what you’re going to measure to make sure that it’s working, and keeping them just appraised along the way, then you’re going to minimize people’s frustration. And that can lead to a lot of things. You know, when people are unsure about the future, they think that the strategy is shifting, they lose faith in leadership, that can have, you know, attrition and other things that happen.
So that’s always on my mind. It’s something that I just try and get ahead of with a lot of transparent communication.
Irina 16:07
What you just said reminds me of the golden circle principle. And if I can associate it is always communicate the why. And what changes is what we do and how we do.
But the why remains the same, regardless. So as long as we do this and communicate it internally to the team, everybody has the North Star metric. And maybe the journey is different, but we are still leading towards that.
Mark 16:39
Exactly. Yep, perfect way to put it.
How to prioritize customer success roles in a startup
Irina 16:41
Speaking of that, because you’ve been working in different startups, how did you manage to prioritize in startups, the customer success roles? Because what I hear from a lot of other CS leaders is that usually CS doesn’t take a role of the table when it comes to the initial phases. And it’s harder to fight for resources, for budget, for proving that it’s more than a reactive support, regardless of how we label it and the filter we put on it.
Mark 17:19
Yeah, no. And I think that sentiment is changing in the industry the last couple of years, which is good. So as we’ve been in a little bit of a startup desert the last couple of years in some ways, where new sales have slowed down and you’re not seeing as much growth in most companies as we did back in the end of the 2010s and start of 20s.
So I think that’s shifting a little bit. But what I’ve always tried to do is really focus on the revenue impact of CS. And it probably comes, to be honest, it probably comes from my very first journey into, I mean, I wouldn’t actually even call it customer success because there wasn’t customer success back then.
So the first role that I had at a startup back at the end of the 90s, start of the 2000s was leading a team of account managers. And I see that role exactly as what CS can be now and is in many cases, where when the role was kind of pitched to me, they said, oh, it’s like an inside sales role. And I said, oh, I don’t know about that.
I don’t know if I really want to be in sales. And they said, no, it’s not sales and the car salesman trying to push something out of something they don’t want. It’s really getting to know a customer that’s a current customer.
They have a lot of needs that are unmet. They have a lot of business goals that we can help. We can help make their business better.
We can make them more profitable. We can make them more efficient. We can do all these things that will help bolster their business by adding other products to their package that they have with us.
And I said, oh, this is great. I love this. I love people.
I love helping. I love driving value. And that’s kind of how I got my start into CS, which I think holds the same now.
And it may not be the same for some teams if you don’t have expansion as part of your, you know, your charter. But everyone is probably handling renewals. Renewals have a huge impact to the company.
And as long as you’re communicating that constantly. So you’re tying all the work that the team is doing to the business outcomes that you’re getting. So you’re increasing renewals.
You’re keeping revenue. If you are driving expansion, which I always think is a great thing for CS to have, here’s the impact of that. You’re able to impact net retention.
And even if expansion is going through a different team, all of the work that you’re doing day in, day out, so those QBRs that you’re doing, you’re driving adoption, that all does fuel expansions. If you’re identifying expansion opportunities and giving those to the sales team to close, making sure that you’re measuring those. Because, of course, the sales team will celebrate, hey, we just closed a $100,000 expansion.
This is great. Go for it. Making sure that the whole company knows, yes, we did.
That’s great. We celebrate with sales. But here’s how that opportunity came about.
Here’s all the work that we’ve done for this customer for the prior year to get them to that state. And making sure that everybody knows there is a very, very direct tie to revenue with CS. And once you can get that, then it’s a lot easier to have a real seat at the table and to have a voice that everyone’s going to listen to.
Because they see that without CS, many times you’re going to have a huge leaky bucket. You’re going to have customers churning. You’re not going to have expansion.
Your net retention isn’t going to be as good. There’s a lot of very solid business drivers that CS impacts.
Post-sales experience and the onboarding playbook
Irina 21:01
I want to speak about that post-sales experience that you have. And I want to ask you, when you walk in the door, what’s the first thing you focus on to start making a difference? I want to share with our audience some of your tips and tricks.
Mark 21:21
Yeah. And you mean like right when I start with a new company?
Irina 21:25
Yes. When you start in a new CS role, what’s your onboarding playbook? Let me ask you something or in a different way.
What do you need in order to be successful in your role? And what questions are you trying to find the answer in the first 90 days or maybe not necessarily 90 days, but at the beginning of the journey to make sure you are successful in the role?
Mark 21:57
Yep. Yeah. So I think the very first thing that you can do, and also I don’t think it needs to be a 90-day goal.
I think it actually should be the first few weeks, even starting at the first week, is at the very beginning, jumping in and talking to customers directly. So I’ve always started with, I need to talk to as many customers as I can in the first week. And then the second week and the third week and really continuing that for the first month and jumping in to find out what led them to buy with us.
Even if you have some of this data documented, it’s only going to tell part of the story. And I think you need to sit down and really, really have a deep understanding of your customers, who they are, why they bought, what the value is that they’re getting. How would they describe that value?
And really getting back to that fundamental business impact and business goal. So asking them, hey, if you were to present to your board, here’s the value that Avoma is bringing to you. Like for our customers, I would ask them, how would you, if I’m talking to maybe a VP of sales, how are you going to explain to your CRO, here’s the true business value that we get out of this tool.
And how do they speak about that? How do they quantify things? How are they measuring the ROI?
Are we helping them measure the ROI? What’s the gap? And by doing kind of a roadshow in a way where you’re just meeting and talking to customers via Zoom, if you can, in person even, is so, so insightful.
Like if you can start and jump on a plane, in a car, on a train, on anything that you need to do to get in front of people and talk to a whole lot of customers your first month, the insights that you’re going to get from that are going to be huge. And I always even prioritize, of course, I’ll talk to the teams and cross-functional teams and all that, but I really want to hear from the customer directly, very unfiltered, before I get too deep in the teams. Because your teams, and again, thinking about your CS team, your marketing team you’re going to connect with, your sales team, they may be, you know, of course, hopefully great people and they know the customer and they know the customer’s needs, but they also could have been there for a few years.
They might have a little bit of bias about something. They may have blinders on because we all do. The more we do something and the more number of years we put in, you kind of run like a horse and you have those blinders on and you only see what’s in front, not the whole picture.
So I don’t think there’s anything more important than that, to be honest. Like talk to 20, 50, 100 customers if you can in your first month and that’s going to give you the perspective you need to start to take a step back and say, okay, now here’s what we need to build. Here’s gaps in product.
We don’t have a good way for people to measure ROI on product. Here’s gaps in the marketing and the way that we’re marketing to people. We have people that are buying for this reason.
That may not be the right thing that we should get them in the door with or that might be not the first value that we’re getting them to. So how do you change that marketing message? And I think you get there by that customer communication.
CS helping in the acquisition process
Irina 25:12
I want to change the discussion and move from startups to bigger companies. I know that you’ve been involved in some big acquisitions and I also noticed lately also in the CS industry we start to see a bit of a consolidation. I’m hearing about margin acquisitions of company acquiring other companies. I’m curious how is the CS team impacted when that business transformation happens?
I want to ask you, first of all, how can CS help through an acquisition process? How can CS help a company be acquired and what happens with the CS team? What changes?
How can CS teams prepare for what happens afterwards? Let’s talk about before and after an acquisition because you were fortunate to be involved into those processes.
Mark 26:17
Yeah, so I think the first good thing compared to some other departments, at least in terms of people worrying about, oh there’s an acquisition coming, maybe what will happen to my job because that’s going to be the very first thing that everybody thinks about. You know, we have a large company coming in, oh no, they’re going to get rid of us all. I think from what I’ve always seen, the good part about CS is you have so much knowledge in your mind that hopefully is also documented and there’s case studies and all the kind of good content that’s been created, but you have such a wealth of knowledge about the customer and their needs that you’re not a disposable asset compared to other things that are easier to plug and play into.
Like if you look at a finance team, many times when an acquisition happens, the larger company is just going to use their finance team and unfortunately exit the finance team that was there. Sales sometimes too may be easier to plug and play the existing sales team in and have them sell this as a new product even though they don’t have the domain expertise yet. But it’s just easier or more dispensable in some ways, unfortunately, to say, hey, we probably aren’t going to need a lot of this.
But with CS, it’s very, very different. And I think when you think about what you can do before, it’s very simple. I think it really comes down to documenting the wins and again, showing the value that you’re providing.
And it’s not only showing the value in the numbers, which is still the main thing. Here’s how we directly impact revenue at the company but also show it in a way that is capturing those customer stories. And a lot of that comes with a joint partnership with marketing.
So make sure that you have a really good tight fit with the product marketing team and that there are constant case studies that are being created. And those are really showing not only the customer and their success but also typically they’re showing a lot of the consultative feedback and effort that you’ve given that customer and how that’s impacting their business. So one thing that I always want to see in a case study is not just, hey, we adopted this product.
It works great. It does what it should and the product’s awesome. But our CSM wasn’t just telling us, oh, here’s some training.
Here’s how to do this. They were challenging our business. They were saying, no, I wouldn’t do this this way.
I would do it this way. I know your business almost as well as you. I’m like an extension of your company in a way.
I’m a very highly trained kind of consultant that’s going to come in and give you a lot of business value. And when that is documented through case studies and other things too, I think it continues to prove out the value. But then afterwards, you are in this position where, okay, you have a new company that’s come in.
There’s going to be tons of change, but what remains the same is your customer base and their need for someone to help guide them through this process too, because the change is not just impacting the internal team. The change is impacting your customers as well. And customers don’t want to have change.
Nobody likes change. So the more that you can help facilitate a very smooth kind of transfer, that’s going to, again, continue to add value to the customers, to the business. That solidifies the need to have CS as it is. To keep a team intact to drive the right value and revenue.
Irina 30:24
Unfortunately, we are coming to an end with our conversion, but not before I ask you one final thing. You are a founder yourself so you know the ropes. What advice would you give to another startup CEO who is just starting to build the CS function? What should they be aware of?
Mark 30:38
I think it probably goes back to the advice I gave earlier about experimentation. At the start, you have to run very quick, you have to try things out. And I think, as a founder, you do have to listen to your customers. So even if you’re a founder, very early stage, maybe hire someone to start the CS function, while you stay connected to customers. Because the more you get removed from them, the harder it is to do your job setting the right foundation and setting the right strategy for your company.
Irina 31:26
Thank you so much, Mark, for sharing your insights with us today! And a big thank you to all of our listeners. Until next time, stay safe and keep mastering customer success.
